340J 
E8D2 


IRLF 


. 


ITifc   atrfc   ^crimes 


EDWARD    EVERETT. 


AN   ADDRESS 


BY    RICHARD    H.   DANA,   JR. 


AN    ADDRESS 


LIFE   AND    SERVICES 


EDWARD    EVERETT; 


DELIVERED    BEFORE    THE 


MUNICIPAL    AUTHORITIES    AND    CITIZENS 


OF     C  A  M  B  R  I D  G  E, 


KKBIiUAKY    22,    18(35. 


BY     RICHARD     H.    DANA,    JK 


C  A  M  T>  RIDGE: 
S  E  V  E  R    'AN  I>      F  R  A  N  ( J  L  S  . 

1865. 


1-0 


Cambridge   Jpress. 

I)  A  K  I   N      A  X  D      M  E  T  C  A  L  K. 


CITY   OF   CAMBRIDGE, 

MAYOR'S  OFFICE,  Feb.  23,  18Gf>. 
HON.  RrcHARD  II.  DAXA.  JR. 

DKAR  SIR  :  Permit  me,  in  behalf  of  the  City  Council  of  Cambridge, 
and  in  accordance  with  the  concurrent  vote  of  both  branches,  a  copy  of 
which  is  herewith  enclosed,  to  tender  to  you  our  thanks  for  the  inter 
esting  and  eloquent  address  upon  the  life  and  services  of  Edward  Everett, 
delivered  on  the  22d  inst.,  and  to  ask  of  you  a  copy  of  the  address  for 
publication. 

Yours,  respectfully, 

J.  WARREN  MERRILL, 

Ma  ijor. 


MARCH  7,  1805. 

SIR  :  I  have  the  honor  to  acknowledge  the  receipt  of  your  communica 
tion,  with  the  vote  of  the  City  Council,  expressing  their  thanks  for  the 
address  it  was  my  privilege  to  deliver  before  them  on  the  22d  ult., 
and  requesting  a  copy  for  the  press. 

I  have  reduced  the  address  to  writing,  and  am  happy  to  submit  the 
manuscript  to  their  disposal. 

Believe  me, 

Very  respectfully  yours, 

RICH?  II.  DANA,  JR. 
1 1  is  Honor, 

J.  W.  MEIUULT,,  Maor. 


M180G15 


of  Cambribge, 


Ix  COMMON  COUNCIL,  March  22,  1865. 

Ordered,  That  there  bo  printed,  under  the  direction  of  the  Joint 
Standing  Committee  on  Printing,  for  the  use  of  the  City  Council,  one 
thousand  copies  of  the  Address  delivered  by  Richard  H.  Dana,  Jr.,  Esq., 
before  the  City  Government,  on  the  22d  February  last,  in  commemora 
tion  of  the  Life  and  Services  of  EDWARD  EVERETT. 

Adopted,  and  sent  up  for  concurrence. 

ATTEST,  JOS.  G.  HOLT,  Clerk. 


IN  BOARD  OF  ALDERMEN,  March  22,  1865. 
Concurred. 

ATTEST,  JUSTIN   A.  JACOBS,  City  Clerk. 


ADDRESS. 


ADDRESS. 


MR.  MAYOR,  AND  GENTLEMEN  OF  THE  CITY  COUNCIL,— 

When  we  were  all  seeking  for  some  phrase  to 
express  our  sense  of  the  worth  and  dignity  of  the 
man  who  has  been  taken  from  us,  some  one,  I  know 
not  who,  had  the  felicity  to  speak  of  him  as  the 
First  Citizen  of  the  Republic.  I  believe  the  fitness 
of  this  appellation  has  been  recognized  by  the  com 
munity  ;  and  when  Mr.  Seward,  at  the  seat  of  gov 
ernment,  by  order  of  the  President,  announced  to 
the  whole  country  the  death  of  EDWARD  EVERETT, 
and  requested  that  all  honor  should  be  paid  to  his 
memory  wherever,  at  home  or  abroad,  the  national 
authority  was  recognized,  all  the  people  said  Amen  ! 

He  belonged,  indeed,  to  the  whole  country.  Sci 
ence  had  a  claim  upon  him.  In  his  youth,  Poetry 
marked  him  for  her  own.  The  Fine  Arts,  in  all 
their  forms,  recognized  in  him  a  devoted  student. 
Public  Law,  international  and  constitutional,  ac 
knowledged  him  one  of  her  best  interpreters.  And, 
the  civilized  world  over,  whatever  the  differences  of 

7 


LvL  ll  t  ^  >\  \,1  ADDRESS. 

language  or  the  laws  of  naturalization,  he  was  one 
of  the  foremost  citizens  of  the  Universal  Republic 
of  Letters. 

And  yet,  Mr.  Mayor,  you  advanced  no  more  than 
a  just  claim  when  you  recommended  to  your  brethren 
of  the  City  Council  that  Cambridge  should  assert  her 
privilege  of  expressing,  on  this  day,  by  civic  and 
military  honors  and  public  speech,  the  sentiment  of 
the  community. 

Mr.  Everett  was  born  in  a  neighboring  town,  passed 
his  boyhood  in  the  adjoining  city,  and  at  the  age  of 
thirteen  came  to  Cambridge  to  enter  our  University. 
His  whole  academic  life  was  spent  here.  In  the  old 
meeting-house,  now  no  more,  scarce  a  bowr-shot  from 
where  we  stand,  he  made  his  first  public  appearance, 
in  his  graduating  oration,  at  the  head  of  his  class. 
When  pastor  of  the  Church  in  Brattle  Street,  he  was 
still  within  the  sound  of  the  college  bells ;  and,  after 
his  sojourn  in  Europe,  it  was  to  Cambridge  that  he 
returned,  as  his  home.  It  was  from  Cambridge  that 
he  sent  forth  that  influence  which  drew  all  New 
England  scholars  to  a  more  earnest  study  of  classical 
literature  and  art.  It  was  upon  the  platform  of 
that  old  meeting-house,  again,  that  in  1824,  in  his 
Phi  Beta  Kappa  oration,  he  made  an  era  in  our 
literature,  and  gained  the  first  great  success  for 
purely  literary  demonstrative  oratory.  For  ten  years 
he  represented  our  district  in  Congress,  always  sup 
ported  by  the  vote  of  Cambridge.  After  varied  ex 
periences  of  public  life,  he  returned  to  us  again,  to 
become  the  President  of  our  University.  Resigning 


ADDRESS. 

that  office,  he  still  remained  among  us,  performing, 
with  his  usual  fidelity,  all  the  duties,  even  the  least 
conspicuous,  of  a  private  citizen.  His  published 
works  show  no  less  than  four  addresses  made  at  ex 
hibitions  of  our  High  School.  He  gave  you  the  de 
sign  of  your  city  seal  and  its  motto,  expressing,  as  it 
always  seemed  to  me,  as  well  his  own  achievement 
as  the  history  of  the  town:  "LiTERis  ANTIQUIS,  NOVIS 
INSTITUTIS,  DECORA."  He  was  a  landholder  among  us. 
The  street  that  bears  his  name  ran  through  his  own 
acres.  On  the  spot  where  the  old  meeting-house 
stood, — dear  no  doubt  to  him, —  he  planted  a  grove 
of  oaks  and  maples,  and  afterwards  told  the  alumni 
that  for  that,  if  for  nothing  else,  he  hoped  to  be 
kindly  remembered  by  posterity.  He  loved  our  Uni 
versity.  He  took  pride  in  its  antiquity,  its  honors, 
and  its  wealth ;  but  he  took  more  pride  in  remem 
bering  that  our  ancestors  founded  Harvard  College, 
not  at  their  leisure,  and  out  of  their  abundance,  but 
endowed  it  with  pecks  of  hard-raised  wheat,  and 
founded  it  while  they  were  yet  living  in  log  huts, 
with  the  Indian  lurking  in  the  swamp,  and  the  wolf 
prowling  about  the  door.  He  loved  to  remember 
that  college-bred  men  founded  the  institutions  of 
Massachusetts;  that  college-bred  men  —  Harvard  Col 
lege  men  —  argued  the  cause  of  liberty  in  Massachu 
setts  against  the  lawyers  of  Westminster  Hall  and 
the  politicians  of  St.  Stephen's  Chapel ;  that  John 
Adams  and  Samuel  Adams,  John  Hancock,  James 
Otis,  Josiah  Quincy,  and  Joseph  Warren,  were  Har 
vard  College  men. 

B  9 


ADDRESS. 

And  when  the  hour  came  to  him  that  must  come 
to  all,  over  the  familiar  bridge,  along  the  well-known 
way  he  came, —  not,  as  fifty-seven  years  before,  to 
enter  the  portals  of  the  University,  in  the  bloom  of 
youth  and  hope,  to  pluck  the  bright  fruits  of  the 
tree  of  knowledge, —  but  borne  by  a  sorrowing  mul 
titude,  past  the  portals  of  the  University,  past  its 
honored  halls,  seeing  not,  hearing  not,  the  tolling 
bells,  the  uncovered  heads,  to  our  own  Mount  Au 
burn.  And  we  are  the  guardians  of  all  of  him  that 
could  die. 

One  evening,  in  the  delightful  circle  that  gathered 
about  President  Kirkland,  upon  a  friendly  challenge, 
he  wrote  his  Dirge  of  Alaric, — familiar,  trite  even, 
by  the  declamation  of  school-boys,  —  expressing  the 
defiant  wish  of  the  savage,  misanthropic  Visigoth:  — 

"  When  I  am  dead,  no  pageant  train 
Shall  waste  their  sorrows  at  my  bier, 

Nor  worthless  pomp  of  homage  vain 
Stain  it  with  hypocritic  tear ; 

For  I  will  die  as  I  did  live, 

Nor  take  the  boon  I  cannot  give. 

"Ye  shall  not  raise  a   marble  bust 

Upon  the  spot  where  I  repose  ; 
Ye  shall  not  fawn  before  my  dust, 

In  hollow  circumstance  of  woes, — 
Nor  sculptured  clay,  nor  lying  breath 
Insult  the  clay  that  moulds  beneath. 

"  Ye  shall  riot  pile,  with  servile  toil, 

Your  monuments  upon  my  breast  ; 
Nor  yet,  within  the  common  soil, 

Lay  down  the  wreck  of  power  to  rest, 
10 


A  1)  D  R  E  S  S . 

Where  man  can  boast  that  he  has  trod 
On  him  that  was  '  the  scourge  of  God.' 

"  But  ye  the  mountain  stream  shall  turn, 

And  lay  its  secret  channel  bare, 
And  hollow,  for  your  sovereign's  urn, 

A  resting-place  forever  there  ; 
Then  bid  its  everlasting  springs 

Flow  back  upon  the  king  of  kings ; 
And  never  be  the  secret  said, 
Until  the  deep  give  up  his  dead." 

It  was  no  hypocritic  tear  that  fell  upon  his  coffin  ! 
It  was  no  homage  vain  that  we  paid  at  his  bier ! 
We  will  raise  the  marble  bust!  We  will  rear,  with 
no  servile  toil,  but  with  the  glad  service  of  the 
whole  community,  the  monument  upon  his  breast ! 
We  have  given  him  no  secret  burial  beneath  the 
waters  of  a  rushing,  oblivious  flood  ;  but  we  have 
laid  him  within  the  common  soil,  in  consecrated 
earth ;  and  there  the  fixed,  patient  marble,  blessed 
in  its  consecration,  shall  point  for  ages  to  the  spot 
where  lies,  not  the  wreck  of  power,  not  the  scourge 
of  God,  but  the  benefactor  of  his  race  and  age. 

The  day  is  auspicious.  If  there  is  a  name  which 
may  be  fitly  connected  with  the  birthday  of  the 
father  of  his  country,  it  is  the  name  of  Edward 
Everett ! 

This  presence,  too,  is  propitious.  Magistrates,  citi 
zens  of  renown,  have  come  down  to  us  from  their 
high  places, — have  come  up,  rather,  —  for  he  called 
this  our  intellectual  metropolis,  the  beautiful  Mount 
Zion  of  the  mind. 

11 


ADDRESS. 

All  is  propitious,  —  the  place,  the  authority,  the 
day,  the  presence.  I  alone  need  invoke  consideration 
and  excuse. 

The  history  of  Mr.  Everett's  life  is  too  familiar  to 
require  or  justify  anything  like  biographical  detail 
from  me.  He  loved  to  remember  and  to  say  that, 
in  respect  of  birth  and  education,  he  had  nothing 
that  was  not  common  to  all;  that  he  owed  to  our 
common  institutions  all  he  was  and  all  he  ever  should 
be.  He  was  not,  as  some  would  falsely  say,  favored 
by  fortune  with  high  birth,  great  wealth,  and 
shining  social  position,  achieved  for  him  by  others. 
He  was  favored  only — how  could  he  possibly  have 
been  favored  more? — in  his  mental  and  moral  consti 
tution,  and  in  the  blessing  of  an  educated,  intelligent, 
religious  parentage.  What  better  picture  could  be 
presented  of  the  results  of  our  institutions  than  a 
yeoman's  son  from  New  Hampshire  studying  law  in 
an  office  in  Boston,  eking  out  the  slender  support 
of  himself  and  his  brother,  by  occasionally  teach 
ing  under  the  low  roof  of  the  school-house  in  Cross 
Street,  and,  book  in  hand,  Daniel  Webster  hearing 
the  recitation  of  Edward  Everett !  Through  life,  Mr. 
Everett  bore  the  faithful  impress  of  these  beginnings. 
Scholarly,  sensitive,  reserved,  fastidious,  he  yet  had  no 
tendencies  to  the  aristocratic.  A  reverent  student  of 
antiquity,  a  devotee  of  honored  names  and  places,  he 
yet  had  few  answering  chords  to  the  imposing  claims 
of  high  birth,  long  descent,  the  traditional  6clat  of 
generations,  and  the  splendid  results  of  primogeni 
ture  and  entail.  In  individuals,  as  in  communities, 


12 


ADDRESS. 

he  seemed  to  look  for,  to  value,  little  else  than  in 
telligence,  virtue,  culture,  and  manners. 

Schoolmates,  classmates,  the  greater  intimacy  of 
room-mates,  have  borne  testimony  to  the  purity 
and  high  purpose  of  his  youth,  and  to  that  radiant, 
hopeful  beauty  that  gave  him  an  easy  power  of 
fascination.  But,  not  content  with  a  success  so  easily 
obtained,  he  gave  to  everything  labor  as  patient  and 
systematic  as  the  dullest  faculties  would  have  re 
quired,  and  thus  plucked  those  fruits  of  knowledge 
and  honor  which  seemed  but  to  fall  at  his  touch. 
There  is  a  tradition  of  the  elated,  joyous  sensation 
that  pervaded  the  audience  at  his  graduating  oration, 
delivered  at  the  age  of  seventeen,  and  at  his  poem 
before  the  Phi  Beta  Kappa  Society,  the  next  year. 
At  an  age  when  most  young  men  now  enter  college, 
he  was  called  to  the  pulpit  of  Brattle  Street,  then 
the  most  exacting  pulpit  in  Boston,  to  be  the  suc 
cessor  of  Buckminster  ;  and  surely,  it  should  be 
enough  for  me  to  say  that,  while  yet  in  his  mi 
nority,  the  received  opinion  was  that,  in  point  of 
pulpit  eloquence,  he  had  equalled  his  predecessor. 

It  was  not  only  as  a  pulpit  orator  that  he  be 
came  celebrated.  Mr.  George  Bethune  English,  a  man 
not  without  parts  and  acquirements,  had  published 
a  pamphlet  attacking  the  claims  of  Christianity  as 
a  divine  revelation.  The  work  was  having  too  much 
influence,  which  some  attempts  at  answering  it  had 
not  diminished,  when  Mr.  Everett  brought  to  bear 
upon  it  the  force  of  his  scholarship,  logic,  eloquence, 
and  wit.  He  not  only  refuted  the  arguments  of 


A  /JDK ESS. 

Mr.  English,  but  so  destroyed  his  credit  as  a  scholar 
and  an  honest  controversialist,  that  he  sent  the 
pamphlet  down  to  oblivion  with  such  an  acceleration 
of  force  as  to  carry  along  the  refutation  with  it ; 
and  now  after  just  half  a  century  of  penal  service 
in  the  land  of  forgetfulness,  it  has  been  dragged 
back,  to  add  to  the  funeral  honors  of  its  censor,  an 
unwilling  witness  to  the  justness  and  completeness 
of  its  condemnation. 

At  this  time  there  was  no  separate  professorship 
of  Greek  at  Harvard,  and  it  was  the  earnest  desire 
of  President  Kirkland  that  one  should  be  established. 
At  his  suggestion,  such  a  professorship  was  founded 
by  a  liberal  citizen  of  Boston,  Mr.  Eliot.  There  was 
no  person  thought  to  be  fully  qualified,  and  it  was 
understood  that  whoever  was  appointed  to  the  post 
should  pass  several  years  of  preparatory  study  in 
Europe.  It  was  without  difficulty  that  the  choice 
fell  upon  Mr.  Everett,  and  he  sailed  in  the  early 
spring  of  1815,  and  spent  nearly  five  years  there. 

This  I  regard  as  the  decisive  period  of  his  life. 
Will  you,  therefore,  go  back  with  me,  and,  shutting 
your  eyes  to  the  present,  forgetting  all  that  fifty 
years  have  done  for  our  country,  consider  what  it 
was  that  he  left,  and  to  what  he  went? 

The  entire  free  white  population  of  the  country  did 
not  exceed  six  millions.  Our  claims  to  high  civiliza 
tion  were  put  forth  uncertainly  at  home,  and  hardly 
regarded  abroad.  Extreme  doctrines  of  State  rights 
had  so  prevailed  that  we  hardly  knew  whether  we 
had  a  central  government.  The  first  spade  had  not 

14 


ADDRESS. 

been  struck  in  the  Erie  Canal.  Not  a  house  stood 
upon  the  wastes  where  are  now  the  cities  of  Lowell 
and  Lawrence;  and  the  Merrimack  and  the  Connecti 
cut  ran  their  whole  course  unobstructed  to  the  sea. 
It  was  seven  years  afterward  that  the  first  manufac 
turing  corporation  on  the  Merrimack  was  organized. 
Antiquity  of  our  race  on  this  continent,  there  was 
none.  Time  had  not,  as  now,  gathered  about  our 
early  history  its  gray  hues  and  venerable  forms. 
Names  now  classic  were  familiar  and  recent.  The 
sages  of  the  revolutionary  period  had  not  shuffled 
off  the  mortal  coil  of  party  connection  and  prejudice. 
Of  later  men,  Webster's  name  wTas  not  known  across 
the  Atlantic :  and  Wheaton,  Kent,  arid  Story  had  not 
written  one  of  the  works  which  have  made  them 
authority  in  both  hemispheres.  In  history,  Prescott 
had  graduated  that  year,  Bancroft  and  Palfrey  were  in 
college,  Hildreth  was  at  school,  and  Motley  an  infant 
in  his  cradle.  Universities,  except  in  name,  we  had 
none.  No  college  had  a  scientific  school  in  connec 
tion  with  it,  nor  a  law  school  in  successful  operation. 
There  were  no  museums  of  Zoology  or  Anatomy, 
few  and  poor  cabinets  of  Geology  and  Mineralogy, 
and  not  an  observatory  nor  a  sidereal  telescope.  We 
had  no  public  library  as  large  or  as  rich  as  the 
private  library  of  Lord  Spencer  at  his  country-seat  at 
Althorpe.  In  the  fine  arts,  West  and  Copley,  always 
British  subjects,  were  domiciled  in  London,  and  All- 
ston,  still  young,  was  studying  and  travelling  in 
Europe.  We  had  no  galleries  of  pictures  or  statues. 
I  doubt  if  there  was  even  a  professed  original  of  the 


ADDRESS. 

great  masters  in  the  land,  and  we  had  produced  no 
native  sculptor. 

In  architecture,  our  Capitol  and  other  public  build 
ings  at  Washington  were  smoking  ruins ;  and,  except 
a  few  State  Houses,  we  had  scarcely  a  secular  building 
with  any  pretensions  to  architectural  effect ;  while 
religious  architecture  had  hardly  begun  its  exodus 
from  the  clapboarded  and  shingled  barns  of  our 
ancestors.  In  music,  we  had  some  marches  and 
popular  songs ;  but  the  opera  and  prima  donna  from 
Europe  had  not  visited  us ;  and,  except  some  modest 
attempts  at  the  great  oratorios  in  Boston,  religious 
music  had  hardly  dared  even  to  plan  its  escape  from 
the  prison-house  of  Puritan  restraints.  Monuments, 
we  had  none,  —  neither  at  Concord,  nor  at  Lexington, 
nor  on  Bunker  Hill.  In  poetry,  there  had  been  pa 
triotic  effusions,  but  their  merits  were  rather  moral 
than  artistic.  The  Thanatopsis  had  not  been  written, 
nor  one  of  those  poems  which  have  given  to  their 
authors  the  name  and  fame  of  American  poets.  Irv 
ing  had  not  -written  his  Sketch-Book,  nor  Cooper 
one  of  his  novels;  and  it  was  five  years  after  Mr. 
Everett  sailed  for  Europe  that  the  most  liberal  of 
British  essayists,  in  the  most  liberal  of  British  jour 
nals,  put  the  famous  question,  "  Who,  in  the  four 
quarters  of  the  globe,  reads  an  American  book?" 

Such  was  the  country  which  he  left,  —  he,  the 
scholar,  the  poet,  the  devout  student  of  antiquity, 
the  lover  of  the  fine  arts,  the  appreciator  of  science, 
the  delighted  sojourner  in  libraries  and  galleries,  the 
reverent  visitor  of  consecrated  spots,  —  and  for  what  ? 

16 


A  D D R ESS. 

He  went  to  trace  a  civilization  of  twenty-five  hun 
dred  years, — an  antiquity  counting  by  tens  of  centu 
ries  as  we  count  by  years ;  to  muse  among  the  fallen 
columns,  the  broken  arches,  the  ruined  walls  of  a 
civilization  of  exquisite  beauty ;  to  follow  the  faint 
traces  of  the  site  of  Troy;  to  wander  through  the 
pass  of  Thermopylae,  and  over  the  fields  of  Marathon 
and  Plataea.  He  went  to  visit  not  only  the  Home 
of  Cicero  and  Virgil  and  the  Caesars,  but  the  Rome 
of  to-day,  the  Eternal  City,  the  seat  of  the  more 
wonderful  ecclesiastical  power.  He  went,  not  only 
to  explore  the  traces  of  the  past,  but  to  meet  the 
splendid  civilization  of  actual  Europe ;  to  note  the 
tread  of  armies  and  the  sweep  of  navies ;  to  see 
Europe  bristling  with  bayonets  from  Gibraltar  to 
the  North  Sea;  to  confront  the  dazzling  military 
fame  of  Napoleon ;  to  see  statesmen  assembling 
at  Vienna  and  Paris  to  lay  out  the  boundaries  of 
empires,  to  make  gifts  of  crowns  and  sceptres,  and 
to  settle  the  public  law  of  Europe ;  and  to  meet 
princes  and  nobles,  heads  of  families  of  an  antiq 
uity  running  back  to  a  mythical  origin,  whose 
ancestors  for  generations  had  commanded  armies 
and  navies,  led  senates  and  cabinets,  and  not  only 
affected  the  destinies  of  empires,  but  changed  the 
face  of  nature  itself.  The  peculiar  child  of  aca 
demic  education,  he  went  to  visit  universities  where 
were  gathered  the  teachers  and  the  taught  of  a 
continent;  and  to  find,  at  Oxford,  a  university  so 
ancient  that  one  of  its  colleges,  called,  par  excel 
lence,  the  New  College,  was  founded  a  hundred  years 


ADDRESS. 

before  Columbus  discovered  America.  The  student 
of  books,  he  went  to  examine  libraries  where  had 
been  gathered  not  only  all  there  was  of  literature 
in  printed  volumes,  but  illuminated  manuscripts  and 
parchments  older  than  the  revival  of  letters.  The 
lover  of  art,  he  went  not  only  to  explore  the  beau 
tiful  remains  of  classic  art  in  all  its  orders,  but  to 
view  the  castles  arid  towers  of  the  feudal  ages,  and 
magnificent  Gothic  structures  on  so  vast  a  scale  that 
through  the  great  windows  of  one  of  them  might 
have  been  pushed,  one  after  the  other,  all  the  build 
ings  of  his  Alma  Mater,  their  cellars  and  chimneys 
with  them.  He  went  to  observe  historic  spots  in  all 
parts  of  the  continent,  marked  by  fit  monuments,  and 
the  great  squares  of  cities  embellished  by  the  statues 
of  heroes,  vsages,  saints,  and  kings;  to  visit  galleries 
where  were  collected  the  paintings  of  the  schools 
of  every  age  and  nation ;  and  to  find,  hidden  among 
the  untrodden  ways  on  the  roof  of  the  Cathedral 
at  Milan,  more  marble  statuary  than  he  could  have 
found,  in  his  own  country,  from  Maine  to  the  Mis 
sissippi.  The  appreciator  of  science,  there  lay  before 
him  not  only  the  homes  and  working-places  of 
Galileo,  Copernicus,  Leibnitz,  Kepler,  and  Newton, 
but  he  was  to  find  living  and  honored  Humboldt, 
Cuvier,  and  Davy.  The  orator  and  student  of  history 
and  public  law,  he  went  not  only  to  stand  where 
Demosthenes  and  ^Eschines  had  contended  and  St. 
Paul  had  preached,  where  Cicero  and  Hortensius  had 
spoken,  but  in  the  land  of  his  mother  tongue,  to 
enter  halls  about  whose  arches  he  might  fancy  yet 

18 


A  D  DRE  SS. 

lingered  tones  of  Chatham,  Burke,  Fox,  and  the 
younger  Pitt.  He  went  to  hear  the  rising  elo 
quence  of  Canning;  to  see  Castlereagh  return  from 
representing  triumphant  England  at  Vienna,  assign 
ing  to  kings  and  empires  their  limits  and  their  laws, 
and  adjusting  the  balance  of  power  for  Europe ;  and 
to  meet,  in  the  familiarity  of  private  intercourse, 
Romilly,  Mackintosh,  and  Hallam.  A  poet,  he  was 
not  only  to  wander  among  scenes  ennobled  by  the 
verse  of  Homer  and  of  the  bright  company  of  later 
Grecian  poets,  —  to  visit  the  tomb  of  Virgil  and  the 
villa  of  Horace ;  not  only  to  follow  the  later  traces 
of  Dante,  Petrarch,  Boccaccio  and  Tasso,  and  the  still 
greener  memory  of  Schiller,  and  in  the  home  of  his 
forefathers  the  footsteps  of  Shakspeare.  Milton,  Dry- 
den,  and  Pope ;  but  to  sojourn  in  lands  illumined  by 
the  living  genius  of  Goethe,  Wordsworth,  Coleridge, 
Southey,  Campbell,  and  Moore ;  to  talk  with  Byron 
in  his  library,  and  to  be  the  guest  of  Scott  at 
Abbotsford. 

I  pass  over  his  studiousness  at  Gottingen,  where 
Mr.  Ticknor  tells  us  that,  on  one  occasion,  Mr.  Ev 
erett,  desiring  to  send  to  President  Kirkland  a  state 
ment  of  the  system  of  the  German  Universities,  and 
wishing  to  get  it  off  by  a  certain  mail,  gave  to  it, 
without  sleep  or  rest,  thirty-five  consecutive  hours.  I 
pass  by  his  instructive  travels,  his  days  spent  in  use 
ful  observation  and  in  the  society  of  the  learned 
and  the  eminent,  and  his  nights  intensely  studious, — 
remarking  only  that  he,  if  any  one,  had  a  right  to 
say  to  the  young  men  of  his  country  that  the  busiest 


ADDRESS. 

have  time  enough  for  much  additional  labor,  if  their 
passions  and  indolence  would  suffer  them,  and  that 
a  man's  future  depended  much  upon  his  choice  of 
pleasures,  and  the  way  in  which  he  spent  his  leisure 
hours; — I  pass  by  all  this,  to  ask — with  what  con 
victions  and  purposes  did  he  return  to  his  native 
land  ? 

We  will  await  the  answer  until  he  gives  it  him 
self.  Returning  to  Cambridge,  he  delivered  his 
courses  of  lectures,  for  nearly  six  years,  upon  Greek 
and  incidentally  upon  Roman  literature  and  art, 
which  gave  an  impulse  to  those  studies,  and  threw 
over  them  an  attraction  which,  short  as  was  his 
term  of  office,  must  have  quite  repaid  the  care  of 
President  Kirkland  and  the  liberality  of  Mr.  Eliot. 
He  was  still  a  preacher,  and  his  first  sermon,  after 
his  return,  was  preached  at  Brattle  Street.  The 
present  pastor  of  that  society  will  tell  you,  that, 
then  a  boy  at  school,  by  dint  of  going  very  early 
to  the  church,  and  crowding  persistently  through  the 
passages,  he  succeeded  in  getting  a  standing-place  in 
a  window-seat,  where,  looking  between  the  shoulders 
of  two  men,  he  caught  his  first  view,  in  the  pulpit, 
of  Edward  Everett,  and  received  his  first  impres 
sion  of  what  was  meant  by  the  word  Eloquence. 
Mr.  Everett  preached  on  several  occasions,  and  one 
sermon,  especially  remembered,  from  the  text,  "The 
time  is  short."  There  are  men  who  can  tell  you  now 
what  words,  what  tones,  sent  a  thrill  through  the 
audience  ;  and  more  sensitive  women  who  will  con 
fess  to  you,  perhaps,  —  they  might  if  they  would, — 


ADDRESS. 

at  what  word,  what  tone  it  was  that,  having  held 
bravely  out  till  then,  they  gave  way  to  tears. 

In  1824,  he  delivered  the  Phi  Beta  Kappa  ora 
tion  ;  and  in  that  it  is  that  I  discover  the  convic 
tions  and  purposes  with  which  he  returned  to  his 
native  land.  I  find  in  that  the  key-note  to  his  sub 
sequent  life. 

I  pass  over  the  dramatic  character  of  the  scene, — 
the  presence  of  heroes  and  sages  of  the  Ke volution, 
and  of  Lafayette  himself,  —  which  have  made  it  one 
of  our  historic  epochs.  I  cannot  attempt  to  describe 
to  you  —  they  only  who  saw  it  can  probably  appre 
ciate  it — the  thrilling  effect  of  his  allusion  to  Lafay 
ette.  He  described  the  young  hero,  ready  to  cast 
aside  rank,  wealth,  honors,  home,  all  for  our  distant 
and  desperate  struggle,  offering  to  our  commission 
ers  at  Paris  the  service  of  himself  and  friends, 
and  asking  only  transportation  to  America  ;  and 
our  country  so  poor  in  money  and  in  credit  that 
our  commissioners  were  obliged  to  say  that  they 
could  not  provide  him  a  vessel.  "Then,"  cried  the 
youthful  hero,  "  I  will  provide  my  own ! "  There 
was  something  in  the  presence  of  that  hero  him 
self,  in  the  magnetism  of  the  orator,  that  caused  a 
scene  which  can  be  described  by  scarce  any  other 
word  than  tumult.  It  was  many  minutes  before  or 
der  was  restored.  Old  men  sprang  to  their  feet, 
shook  one  another's  hands,  and  shed  tears,  as  if  they 
had  that  moment  heard  that  Lafayette  was  coming 
to  their  aid  in  the  most  desperate  state  of  their 

fortunes.      And    Lafayette    himself,  never  perfect  in 

21 


ADDRESS. 

our    language,    not    detecting    the    application,    was 

-7    ^/ 

among  the  most  active  in  the  applause. 

I  may,  however,  pause  to  say  that  Mr.  Everett  on 
that  day  founded  the  school  of  literary,  demonstra 
tive  oratory  in  America.  I  limit  my  meaning  by 
those  words :  titerary,  as  distinguished  from  theologi 
cal,  political,  scientific,  or  jurisprudential ;  demonstra 
tive,  as  not  looking  to  any  action  on  the  part  of 
the  persons  addressed,  to  any  immediate  result  of 
vote,  verdict,  or  judgment,  but  resting  in  general 
impressions;  oratory r,  as  distinguished  from  reading 
or  simple  recitation,  and  giving  scope  to  all  the 
arts  and  powers  of  elocution.  This  school  has  had 
-  many  disciples  and  some  masters ;  but  Mr.  Ever 
ett  was  its  founder,  and,  to  the  last,  acknowledged 
as  its  great  master.  I  have  spoken  of  this  school 
in  America.  In  Europe  it  does  not  exist.  It  went 
out  with  the  decline  of  liberty  in  Greece  and  Rome. 
They  have,  on  the  continent  of  Europe  everywhere, 
the  eloquence  of  the  pulpit;  in  some  parts,  propor 
tionately  to  popular  liberty,  the  eloquence  of  the 
forum ;  and  in  England,  but  scarcely  upon  the  conti 
nent,  the  eloquence  of  the  senate.  They  have  learned 
lectures  on  many  subjects,  read,  mostly  sitting,  from 
the  chairs  of  universities  and  societies;  but  Europe 
has  not,  even  in  England,  as  a  general  effective  pop 
ular  practice,  literary  demonstrative  oratory,  nor  has 
it  been  known  in  Europe  for  two  thousand  years. 

I  pass  by  all  this  to  answer,  at  last,  the  question, 
with  what  purposes  and  convictions  did  Mr.  Everett 
enter  upon  his  public  life  ? 


ADDRESS. 

He  had  not  been  dazzled  by  the  splendid  spec 
tacles  of  military  power  in  Europe.  In  standing 
armies,  he  saw  only  a  modern  contrivance,  not  two 
hundred  years  old,  for  binding  despotisms  upon  dis 
armed  and  disfranchised  peoples.  He  looked  with 
less  dismay  upon  the  turbulence  of  ancient  democ 
racies,  and  upon  the  rude  independence  of  the 
feudal  ages.  Admitting  the  dangers  and  horrors  of 
mobs,  he  yet  cried,  "  But,  oh !  the  disciplined,  the 
paid,  the  honored  inob,  not  moving  in  rags  and 
starvation,  to  some  act  of  blood  or  plunder,  but 
marching,  in  all  the  pomp  and  circumstance  of 
war,  to  lay  waste  some  feebler  State,  or  cantoned 
at  home  among  an  overawed  and  broken-spirited 
people ! " 

All  his  observation  and  study  had  brought  him  to 
the  conviction  that  the  general  diffusion  of  intelli 
gence,  and  the  greatest  moral  and  intellectual 
development  of  human  nature  were  possible  only 
where  popular  liberty  existed,  and  popular  systems 
of  self-government.  He  not  only  contended  that 
this  must  be  so,  because,  under  such  systems,  artifi 
cial  inequalities  being  removed  and  an  opportunity 
being  given  to  all,  men  were  working  in  harmony 
with  the  natural  law  by  which  intellect  itself  is 
distributed,  which  he  called  "a  sterner  leveller  than 
ever  marched  in  the  van  of  a  revolution;"  but  he 
deduced  it  from  the  facts  of  history.  He  contended 
that  although  the  natural  and  exact  sciences  and  cer 
tain  forms  of  arts  and  learning  might  flourish  under 
imperial  patronage,  yet,  not  only  was  knowledge  the 


A  D  I) R ESS. 


most  generally  diffused  among  all,  but  the  greatest 
heights  attained  by  the  few,  where  popular  liberty 
existed,  and  in  proportion  as  it  existed.  He  re 
minded  his  audience  of  scholars,  that  Constantine, 
controlling  half  the  world  by  his  arms,  was  obliged 
to  tear  down  an  arch  of  Trajan  to  find  sculpture 
for  his  own.  fie  had  not  mused  as  a  sentimentalist, 
nor  groped  like  an  antiquarian  or  a  pedant,  among 
the  ruins  of  Greece  and  Rome;  but,  as  a  patriot  and 
a  thinker,  he  had  gathered  from  them  wisdom  for 
his  own  age  and  people.  He  saw  that  the  Greek  re 
publics  were  democracies  undertaking  to  administer 
government  in  person,  without  a  system  of  represen 
tation  or  agency, — never,  in  fact,  getting  beyond  the 
town-meeting  in  Faneuil  Hall,  and  necessarily  con 
fined  within  the  walls  of  a  single  city.  Their  colonies 
and  dependencies  they  governed  with  absolute  power, 
never  extending  to  them  community  in  government. 
They  skirted  the  shores  of  the  Mediterranean,  pene 
trating  but  little  into  the  interior ;  and  so  narrow 
were  the  limits  of  their  civilization,  that  he  tells  us, 
in  one  of  his  picturesque  sentences,  that  the  moun 
tain-tops  of  Thrace,  the  proverbial  home  of  barba 
rism,  could  be  seen  from  the  porch  t>f  the  temple  of 
Minerva  at  Sunium.  These  republics,  with  all  their 
civil  splendor  and  military  prowess,  went  down,  one 
after  another,  before  the  imperial  power  of  Philip 
and  afterward  of  the  Romans,  because  they  could 
not  or  would  not  make  the  sacrifices  necessary  to 
form  a  central  State, — to  do  what  our  ancestors  did 
in  1788,  form  a  more  perfect  union  "to  provide  for 


'24 


ADDRESp. 

the  common  defence  and  promote  the  general  wel 
fare."  He  saw  that  the  Roman  republic  was  an  in 
tensely  centralized  State,  holding  all  its  colonies  and 
provinces  under  absolute  military  government,  Rome 
alone  being  a  metropolis,  and  everything  else  provin 
cial,  if  not  barbarous.  This  centralization  of  power 
made  the  struggle  for  its  possession  intense  and 
deadly,  and  the  influx  of  wealth  and  luxury  to  the 
one  centre  brought  effeminacy  and  corruption,  until 
Rome  herself  yielded  to  barbarian  invaders. 

From  these  pictures,  he  turned  to  our  own  conti 
nent  and  our  system,  at  once  centralized  and  dis 
tributed  ;  where  nothing  is  provincial  and  nothing 
metropolitan ;  founded  in  democracy,  but  adminis 
tered  by  a  conservative  system  of  representation  and 
agency ;  centralized  sufficiently  for  defence  from  for 
eign  aggression,  for  the  creation  of  a  national  senti 
ment,  and  to  preserve  the  peace  and  rights  of  the 
States,  yet  distributed  enough  for  the  general  diffusion 
of  political  education  and  dignities.  By  the  feature 
of  a  single  executive  head,  we  secured  some  of  the 
advantages  of  monarchy;  by  courts,  senates,  and  cab 
inets  of  selected  men,  some  of  the  benefits  of  aris 
tocracy  ;  while,  by  the  distribution  of  powers  among 
coordinate  and  competing  departments,  and  by  writ- 
ten  constitutions  to  which  were  secured  the  force 
and  sanctions  of  law,  and  by  frequent  elections,  we 
seemed  to  protect  ourselves  adequately  against  usur 
pation.  He  looked  to  the  national  government  not 
only  to  preserve  our  unity  and  to  protect  us  from 
abroad,  but  as  the  only  means  of  securing  the  local 

i)  25 


ADDRESS. 

governments  themselves,  and  of  keeping  the  peace  of 
a  continent.  But  it  was  upon  the  local  institutions 
of  the  State  and  the  town  that  he  depended  for  that 
general  diffusion  of  knowledge  and  character  which 
alone  can  elevate  the  whole  human  race.  Each  man 
a  citizen,  as  far  as  possible  owning  the  land  on  which 
he  lived,  called  to  sit  upon  the  jury,  would  feel  him 
self  part  of  the  magistracy  of  the  land ;  bearing  arms, 
he  was  part  of  its  military  power  ;  and,  intrusted 
with  a  vote,  he  was  a  portion  of  the  political  sov 
ereignty.  His  functions,  however  slight  in  degree, 
were,  in  kind,  sovereign.  He  trusted  to  these  duties 
and  responsibilities,  with  the  education  of  the  church 
and  the  school,  to  sober  and  elevate  the  public  mind. 
He  answered  the  argument  that  letters  and  art 
needed  princely  or  metropolitan  patronage.  He  not 
only  exposed  the  partial  and  limited  operation  of 
such  patronage,  from  well-known  instances  and  from 
the  nature  of  the  case,  but  declared  that  the  best 
patronage  was  opportunity  and  stimulus ;  and  wrhere 
could  such  opportunities  and  stimulus  be  found  as 
would  be  furnished  by  the  needs,  the  tastes,  and  the 
pride  of  vast  educated  communities  ?  Has  not  this 
proved  true  ?  I  ask  you,  Mr.  Agassiz,  whether,  in 
your  science,  as  far  removed  as  possible  from  the 
passions  and  interests  of  the  hour,  the  demands  of  an 
intelligent  community  are  not  a  better  patronage, 
not  only  because  a  hundred  thousand  dollars  from 
a  hundred  givers  has  more  of  promise  and  encour 
agement  than  a  hundred  thousand  dollars  from  one 
giver;  but  whether,  measured  by  dollars  and  cents, 


ADD R E S S . 


it  is  not  richer  than  the  patronage  of  kings  and 
princes?  And  he  answered  the  argument,  that  pop 
ular  systems,  if  they  created  more  activity,  gave  it 
an  undue  direction  to  politics.  He  showed,  that  un 
der  monarchies  and  aristocracies,  it  was  only  the 
service  of  the  state,  in  peace  or  war,  that  was  con 
sidered  worthy  of  the  noble ;  while,  in  republics, 
letters,  arts,  science,  commerce,  and  teaching  were 
dignified  in  all. 

He  was  not  satisfied  with  the  prospect  of  a  low 
level  of  mediocrity.  He  knew  that,  as  in  visible 
nature  inequalities  are  essential  to  beauty  and  to 
health,  so,  in  every  state  and  society,  there  must  be 
kings  and  nobles ;  but  he  hoped  that  under  our 
system,  artificial  inequalities  being  removed  and  a 
chance  given  to  all,  we  should  find  —  not  always,  for 
he  was  no  dreamer  ;  nor  perhaps  generally,  but 
more  often  than  under  any  other  system  —  that  the 
sceptre  would  pass  to  the  hand  of  the  natural  king, 
the  coronet  on  the  head  of  the  natural  noble,  as 
we  place  the  wreath  on  the  brow  of  the  real  poet 
and  the  gown  on  the  shoulders  of  the  veritable 
scholar. 

But  there  was  one  view  of  the  future  of  our 
country  which  seemed  to  possess  and  animate  him 
more  than  any  other.  One  of  the  greatest  myste 
ries  of  our  nature  is  that  process  by  which  we  make 
with  the  tongue  vibrations  on  the  air,  which,  strik 
ing  upon  the  ear,  convey  to  others  our  thought, 
wish,  or  emotion ;  or,  by  the  cunning  of  the  hand, 
form  strange  black  marks  on  paper,  by  which  souls 

27 


ADDRESS. 

interchange  ideas.  Yet  it  somehow  happens  —  and 
that  is  no  less  a  mystery — that,  by  a  strange  law  of 
their  being,  men  will  make  different  sounds  and  dif 
ferent  marks,  totally  unintelligible  to  each  other;  and 
so  it  is  that  men,  charged  to  the  full  with  thought 
and  emotion,  are  totally  unable  to  communicate  in 
telligently.  Mr.  Everett  had  not  only  seen  in  libra 
ries  and  on  monuments  these  laborious  attempts  at 
expression  unintelligible  to  the  greater  part  of  the 
human  race,  and  sometimes  to  all  the  living ;  but  in 
Europe,  he  had  found  that  a  river  interposed,  or  a 
chain  of  hills,  left  millions  of  men,  intelligent  and 
cultivated,  without  the  power  of  intercommunication : 
orators,  statesmen,  poets,  preachers,  charged  with 
the  interests  of  the  world,  standing  deaf  and  dumb 
in  the  presence  of  each  other!  He  saw  how  this 
not  only  restricted  personal  communication,  but  lim 
ited  the  power  of  the  press  in  permanent  as  well 
as  current  literature,  discouraged  effort  and  shut  out 
wisdom. 

He  turned  toward  his  own  country,  and  saw  a  vast 
empire  filling  up  with  a  people  speaking  a  common 
language  and  possessing  a  common  literature.  He 
presented  his  statistics  to  show  that  the  ten  millions 
of  that  day  would  become  thirty,  fifty,  an  hundred, 
—  and  why  not,  like  the  Chinese  Empire,  three 
hundred  millions  ?  He  declared  then,  as,  when  Sec 
retary  of  State,  he  said  to  Lord  John  Russel,  in 
1853,  that  he  saw  no  necessary  limits  to  our  repub 
lic,  but  the  geographical  limits  of  the  continent. 
His  soul  swelled  at  the  thought  of  such  a  world  of 

28 


ADDRESS. 

human  beings,  all  able  to  understand  one  another. 
What  a  stimulus  to  the  press  in  periodical  and  per 
manent  literature !  What  fields  for  the  orator  of  the 
pulpit,  the  forum,  the  senate,  and  the  platform! 
What  inspiration  to  the  poet,  the  philosopher,  the 
man  of  science!  What  a  benefit  to  each  one  of 
these  receiving  millions,  from  the  higher  character 
of  the  supply  so  vast  a  demand  would  create! 

Was  this  a  baseless  vision?  We  have  risen  to 
thirty  millions,  covering  the  continent;  and  there 
is  less  of  provincialism  or  dialect  in  the  whole  land 
than  within  the  sound  of  Bow  Bells,  or  within  any 
one  of  the  counties  of  England.  May  this  not  con 
tinue  with  our  increase  ?  There  are  certain  condi 
tions.  The  language  must  be  anchored  to  a  com 
mon  alphabet  and  'a  common  and  substantially 
unchanging  mode  of  spelling.  It  is  moored  to  the 
English  Bible,  the  Book  of  Common  Prayer,  Shak- 
speare,  Milton,  and  John  Bunyan,  and  that  company 
of  later  writers,  in  prose  and  verse,  whose  language 
is  the  vernacular  of  our  race. 

A  common  national  government;  a  common  writ 
ten  constitution,  which  all  must  understand;  the 
periodical  election  of  a  President,  upon  principles 
to  be  canvassed  through  the  land,  with  a  voter  at 
every  hearth-stone ;  a  common  legislature,  debating 
in  a  common  tongue,  its  members  chosen  from 
every  district;  the  rapid  and  general  circulation  of 
a  daily  press;  and,  above  all,  the  instant  communi 
cation  by  telegraph  to  every  part  of  the  land  of 
things  which  it  is  the  interest  of  all  to  hear  at 

'20 


ADDRESS. 

once :  these  all  keep  the  pool  so  troubled  as  to  give 
no  chance  for  dialects  and  provincialisms  to  form 
upon  the  surface.  What  more  affecting  proof  of  this, 
than  when  Mr.  Seward,  the  other  Sunday  afternoon, 
announced,  in  a  few  hours,  in  words  understood  by 
all,  to  the  millions  of  the  land,  —  the  merchants  and 
the  manufacturers  of  the  seaboard,  the  farmers  of  the 
interior,  and  the  miners  among  the  mountains,  —  the 
death  of  Edward  Everett! 

A  scholar,  a  Greek  professor,  so  far  from  lament 
ing  the  good  old  times  when  a  few  scholars  could 
alone  understand  one  another  over  Europe  in  a 
dead  language,  he  held  up  to  the  admiration  of  an 
assembly  of  scholars  the  vision  of  a  vernacular  for 
a  continent.  He  boldly  attacked  the  saying  of  Ba 
con,  that  Luther  prevailed  because  he  awaked  all 
antiquity,  and  declared  that  Luther  prevailed  be 
cause  he  awaked  the  native  tongue  of  Germany, 
because  he  spoke  to  the  land  in  the  speech  of  the 
fireside  and  the  street;  and  that  if  he  had  battled 
only  in  Latin,  he  would  have  been  answered  in  better 
Latin  from  the  Vatican,  and  the  people  would  have 
seen  in  it  only  a  contest  between  angry  priests. 

We  can  see  now  why  he  thought  the  discovery  of 
this  continent  by  Columbus  in  the  fulness  of  time,  and 
held  back  by  Providence  until  that  time,  the  greatest 
event,  not  supernatural,  in  the  history  of  man.  We 
see  how  he  valued  the  settlement  of  this  country  by 
such  men  as  did  settle  it, —  men  trained  to  hardship, 
self-command,  and  serious  thought.  Puritans,  perse 
cuted  by  church  and  state;  churchmen  and  royalists, 

30 


ADDRESS. 

banished  by  the  Puritan  Commonwealth  ;  Huguenots, 
persecuted  by  Catholic  France ;  Catholics,  persecuted 
by  Protestant  England ;  Germans,  exiled  by  the 
wars  of  Louis  XIV.,  and  Quakers,  persecuted  by  all, 
settled  the  various  parts  of  our  country.  He  looked 
upon  our  system  as  the  great  experiment,  on  a  vast 
field  prepared  for  it  by  the  providence  of  God,  for  the 
moral  and  intellectual  development  of  the  human 
race,  by  the  agency  of  individual  liberty  and  popu 
lar,  responsible  systems  of  self-government.  As  he 
approached  his  native  land,  he  saw  a  bright  bow  of 
promise  spanning  the  western  continent.  He  felt 
that  his  mission  was  not  to  preach  in  the  pulpit  of 
Brattle  Street,  nor  in  any  other  pulpit ;  but,  con 
scious  of  powers  of  speech,  assured  of  them  by  the 
public  testimony,  he  determined  to  enter  upon  a 
public  career  of  national  life,  and  to  devote  all  he 
was  and  had  acquired,  to  securing  the  successful  issue 
of  this  vast  experiment.  I  doubt  not  that  he  was 
ambitious.  But  he  sought  opportunities,  and  not 
office.  He  asked  but  a  hearing,  and  no  other  re 
wards  than  that  approbation,  which  I  admit  was  dear 
to  him,  and  fame,  to  which  he  had  too  much  of 
genius  to  be  indifferent. 

He  knew  we  held  our  treasure  in  earthen  ves 
sels.  He  was  no  Utopian  or  sentimentalist.  He  had 
read  and  seen  too  much  of  the  passions  and  weak 
nesses  of  men,  not  to  know  that  our  great  experi 
ment  might  fail.  He  knew  that  the  organization 
of  millions  into  a  State,  permanent  and  benefi 
cent,  was  a  result  for  human  nature  rarely  obtained, 

31 


ADDRESS. 

dearly  bought,  precariously  held,  and,  if  lost,  hardly 
regained. 

Those  who  knew  him  slightly  may  have  thought 
that  he  gave  undue  prominence  to  the  subjects  of 
his  classical  studies.  Since  his  death,  I  have  read 
the  greater  part  of  his  published  writings,  and  can 
truly  say  that  I  doubt  if  ever  so  good  a  scholar 
wrote  and  spoke  so  much,  saying  so  little  of  the 
Greeks  and  Romans.  He  always  declared  that  their 
civilization  had  one  fatal  defect,  the  lack  of  spiritual 
vitality.  He  reminded  the  scholars  of  the  Phi  Beta 
Kappa  that  the  hero  of  Thermopylae  would  not 
have  hesitated  to  tear  his  only  child  from  the  bosom 
of  its  mother,  if  it  happened  to  be  a  sickly  babe,  and 
carry  it  out  to  be  eaten  by  the  wolves  of  Tayge- 
tus;  that  the  heroes  of  Marathon  unchained  their 
slaves  from  the  door-posts  of  their  masters  to  go 
out  and  fight  the  battles  of  freedom.  Painting  the 
possibility  of  our  failure  in  this  grand  trust,  and  its 
direful  consequences  to  human  nature,  he  exclaimed, 
"Greece  cries  to  us  by  the  convulsed  lips  of  her 
poisoned,  dying  Demosthenes;  Rome  pleads  with  us 
in  the  mute  persuasion  of  her  mangled  Tully." 

He  saw  the  necessity  of  exciting  feelings  of  pride 
and  respect  for  our  common  ancestry, — of  elevating 
the  whole  work  of  this  nation,  past,  present,  and  to 
come,  to  the  highest  plane  of  dignity.  True  to  his 
mission,  our  horizon  was  lighted  up  by  unwonted 
fires  at  Concord,  Lexington,  Charlestown,  and  Plym 
outh.  The  names  and  places  were  not  then  clas 
sical.  The  actors  in  the  Revolution  were  living, 

32 


ADDRESS. 

with  the  familiar,  sometimes  the  disagreeable,  even 
the  ludicrous,  sides  of  their  characters  open  to  view. 
The  road  to  Lexington  was  but  a  dusty  highway 
leading  by  Whittemore's  Tavern,  toiled  over  by  coun 
try  wagons,  and  herds  of  sheep  and  oxen  driven  to 
the  shambles  at  Brighton ;  but  to  his  eye  of  faith,  to 
his  vivid  imagination,  Lexington  and  Concord,  Plym 
outh  and  Bunker  Hill,  were  more  truly  worthy  of 
consecration  than  Thermopylae  or  Platsea,  Marathon 
or  the  Eurymedon.  With  rare  rhetorical  courage,  he 
encountered  the  plebeian  surnames,  and  those  un 
couth  Hebrew  first  names  revived  to  be  misapplied 
and  mispronounced  after  four  thousand  years.  In  the 
height  of  a  dramatic  description  of  the  spread  of  the 
alarm  of  the  British  march  to  Lexington,  he  did  not 
fear  to  name  the  borrowing  of  Deacon  Larkin's  horse; 
and  captivity  among  the  Indians  was  no  less  digni 
fied  to  him  because  it  was  the  captivity  of  Mrs.  Je 
mima  Howe  and  Mr.  Pilkial  Grout!  He  had  heard  a 
voice  saying  to  him, — What  God  hath  cleansed,  that 
call  not  thou  common !  What  to  him  were  the  child 
ish  fables  that  hang  over  the  origin  of  Greek  and 
Roman  cities,  compared  with  the  time  when  Massa 
chusetts  consisted  of  six  huts  at  Salem,  and  one  hut 
at  Charlestown  ?  The  covered  wagon,  marked  "  To 
Marietta,  Ohio,"  carrying  the  first  westward  emigra 
tion  from  Massachusetts,  with  its  stock  of  household 
utensils,  was  more  classic  to  him  than  a  pantheon  of 
Greek  and  Roman  Lares,  Penates,  and  Termini.  Our 
civilization  was  not  to  present  the  picturesque  ef 
fects  of  castles,  palaces,  and  towers,  and  the  imposing 

E  33 


ADDRESS. 

material  results  of  great  inequalities  of  condition, 
but  a  land  dotted  over  with  churches,  colleges, 
school-houses,  town-halls,  lecture-rooms,  museums,  ob 
servatories,  galleries,  hospitals,  and  asylums.  "A  ster 
ile  hill-side  in  New  England,  with  a  well-kept  village 
school  at  its  foot,"  was  not  only  a  promise  of  more 
true  wealth  to  a  people,  but  of  more  in  dollars  and 
cents,  than  the  "  lucrative  desolation  of  the  sugar 
islands." 

His  published  volumes  show  addresses  delivered  at 
our  historical  anniversaries,  on  the  19th  of  April,  at 
Lexington,  two:  at  Concord,  two;  on  the  22d  of  Feb 
ruary,  two;  on  the  17th  of  June,  four;  on  the  22d  of 
December,  four;  on  the  4th  of  July,  eight;  and  at  the 
anniversaries  of  the  settlements  of  Springfield,  Barn- 
stable,  Dedham,  and  Dorchester,  and  of  John  Win- 
throp's  landing  at  Charlestown;  and  upon  the  deaths 
of  Adams  and  Jefferson,  Lafayette,  John  Quincy  Ad 
ams,  and  Webster;  and  at  the  inauguration  of  monu 
ments  to  Franklin,  Warren,  and  John  Harvard. 

Doubtless,  as  he  always  acknowledged,  he  owed 
New  England  much;  but  New  England  owes  to  him, 
more  than  to  any  other  man,  the  artistic  consecra 
tion  of  her  historic  names  and  epochs.  "If,"  said 
he,  "my  voice  is  hushed  on  these  themes,  may  it 
never  be  listened  to  on  any  other." 

Not  hushed  on  these  themes,  it  was  heard  on 
many  others.  Science,  art,  literature,  charities,  all 
shared  the  benefits  of  his  eloquence.  In  the  au 
tumn  of  1857,  when,  by  reason  of  commercial  dis 
tress,  a  hard  winter  was  anticipated  for  the  poor, 


ADDRESS. 


he  delivered  an  address  before  the  Boston  Provident 
Society,  which  you  will  remember  by  that  beautiful 
description  of  the  scenery  from  the  hill  of  Four- 
vieres,  behind  Lyons,  which  lies  in  the  memory  like 
a  landscape  of  Claude ;  and  by  the  contrast  he 
drew  between  the  partial,  unsystematic,  individual 
almsgiving  of  Southern  Europe,  which  has  made 
mendicancy  a  profession,  and  the  impartial,  system 
atized,  universal  operation  of  popular,  charitable 
societies.  This  discourse  he  delivered  during  the 
winter  in  the  principal  cities  of  the  land,  —  at  Rich 
mond,  at  Charleston,  and  St.  Louis,  —  in  all,  at 
fifteen  places,  obtaining,  by  the  sale  of  tickets  of 
admission,  nearly  $15,000  for  the  benefit  of  the 
poor  of  the  respective  cities. 

His  most  exquisitely  finished  address  upon  scien 
tific  subjects  is  that  at  the  opening  of  the  Dudley 
Observatory  at  Albany.  I  had  a  personal  experi 
ence  in  connection  with  that  discourse,  which  in 
vests  it,  for  me,  with  a  peculiar  interest.  In  the 
year  1860,  it  was  my  fortune  to  cross  the  Pacific 
Ocean,  a  passenger  in  an  American  merchantman. 
The  unspeakable  beauty  of  the  nights,  while  running 
down  the  trade-winds  in  the  Pacific  tropics,  kept 
me  much  on  deck.  The  companion  of  my  walk 
was  often  the  chief  mate.  He  was  a  man  of 
very  imperfect  education,  but  with  considerable 
natural  capacity.  His  duties  as  a  navigator,  and 
the  constant  presence  of  the  "  brave  o'erhanging 
firmament,  the  majestical  roof  fretted  with  golden 
fires,"  naturally  led  us  to  the  topic  of  astronomy. 


ADD  RE  S  £. 

He  asked  me  if  I  had  ever  read  a  speech  at  the 
opening  of  an  observatory  at  Albany,  by  Edward 
Everett,  who  he  believed  lived  in  my  part  of  the 
Union.  He  was  not  a  little  impressed  when  I  told 
him  that  I  had  not  only  read  the  address,  but  knew 
Mr.  Everett  himself.  He  said  that  he  happened  to 
find  it  in  the  cabin  of  a  ship,  and  had  read  it 
again  and  again.  With  an  inadequate  vocabulary 
and  stammering  speech,  he  tried  to  explain  to  me 
the  thoughts  and  emotions  this  address  had  awa 
kened  within  him;  and  he  did  make  me  feel,  better 
than  eloquence  could  have  done,  that  upon  the  hard, 
low  course  of  his  life  there  had  opened  a  vision 
of  celestial  light;  that  he  had  been  made  to  feel 
something  of  the  vastness  of  the  universe,  of  infinity 
against  space,  and  of  eternity  against  time ;  that  he 
had  been  elevated  by  the  sense  of  being  able  to 
entertain  such  thoughts,  proving  to  him  the  gran 
deur  and  immortality  of  his  nature.  I  regret  that  I 
never  remembered  to  mention  this  to  Mr.  Everett. 
I  am  sure  he  would  have  valued  it  as  not  the 
least  of  his  many  satisfactions. 

Among  other  subjects,  Mr.  Everett  delivered  dis 
courses  upon  the  colonization  of .  Africa,  education 
in  the  West,  the  importance  of  science  to  working 
men,  prison  discipline,  spoke  frequently  before  agri 
cultural  societies  upon  moral  and  intellectual  topics 
relating  to  agriculture,  —  one  being  upon  the  treat 
ment  of  animals, — and  at  the  anniversaries  of  most 
of  our  colleges,  and  of  many  literary  societies;  and, 
as  a  mere  incident,  which  would  have  been  labor 

36 


ADDRESS. 

enough  for  some  men,  he  was,  for  many  years,  the 
editor  of  the  North  American  Review,  and  always 
one  of  its  contributors. 

The  subject  of  the  militia  engaged  his  earnest 
attention.  Although  he  truly  said  he  loved  not 
war  nor  any  of  its  works,  he  knew  that  wars 
were  sometimes  inevitable  and  just.  He  could  un 
derstand  the  position  of  the  Quaker,  who  disallows 
all  use  of  force,  and  would  disband  the  militia, 
abolish  West  Point  and  Annapolis,  and  prohibit 
the  bearing  of  arms  or  the  manufacture  of  muni 
tions  of  war,  and  strive  to  make  the  duty  of  a  sol 
dier  morally  odious;  but  he  could  not  understand 
how  persons  admitting  that  war  might  ever  be  just 
or  inevitable,  could  hold  up  to  ridicule  or  to  moral 
aversion  the  duty  of  a  citizen  soldier  in  a  republic. 
Knowing  that  war  is  a  science  and  a  progressive  sci 
ence,  he  advocated  a  liberal  support  of  the  Military 
Academy,  with  a  small  army,  to  furnish  educated 
officers  and  the  nucleus  for  volunteer  and  militia 
organizations  in  times  of  war ;  but  it  was  to  the 
militia,  the  arms-bearing  citizens,  that  he  looked  for 
that  force  which,  in  times  of  exigency,  should  be  a 
defence  against  our  enemies,  without  being  danger 
ous  to  our  institutions ;  and  one  of  the  reasons  he 
gave  for  a  general  education  was  that  arms  were 
safest  in  the  hands  of  educated  and  responsible 
men.  In  his  discourse  upon  our  French  and  Indian 
War,  "  the  school  of  the  Revolution,"  he  said  that, 
without  a  standing  army,  the  people  of  Massachu 
setts  had  been  one  of  the  most  martial  people  on 


ADDRESS. 

earth ;  that  every  fifth  man  had  been  in  service  ; 
that  a  larger  proportion  of  the  able-bodied  men  of 
Massachusetts  had  been  mustered  into  military  ser 
vice,  during  the  seven  years  of  that  war,  than 
Napoleon  led  into  the  field  from  the  French  people 
in  the  height  of  his  power ;  and  that  the  lines  on 
Bunker  Hill  and  Dorchester  Heights  were  drawn 
and  our  militia  organized  and  commanded  by  men 
who  had  served  with  British  regulars  against  French 
regulars  on  the  frontiers,  in  Canada,  at  Louisburg, 
and  in  the  West  Indies.  If  the  militia  should  not 
be  sustained  with  credit,  he  thought  we  exposed 
ourselves  to  violence  at  home  and  abroad,  or  in 
curred  the  peril  of  standing  armies. 

Mr.  Everett  was  in  Congress,  as  a  member  of  the 
House  of  Representatives,  for  ten  years,  from  1825  to 
1835.  It  has  commonly  been  thought  that  he  owed 
his  passage  to  public  life  to  the  success  of  his  ora 
tions  on  patriotic  subjects;  but  he  was  elected  before 
they  were  delivered,  and  his  nomination  was  deter 
mined  upon  about  the  time  of  nis  Phi  Beta  Kappa 
discourse.  Attention  was  drawn  to  him,  as  having 
talents  for  public  life,  principally  by  his  appearance 
before  the  Board  of  Overseers  of  the  University,  in 
the  spring  of  1824.  The  Board  of  Overseers  was 
at  that  time  probably  the  most  august  assembly  in 
New  England.  He  appeared  to  represent  the  cause 
of  the  Faculty,  or  local  government,  in  their  claims 
to  the  fellowships  of  the  corporation.  He  was  op 
posed  by  powerful  interests  in  Boston  and  Salem, 
but  bore  himself  with  such  firmness,  dignity,  and 


ADDRESS. 


courtesy,  and  showed  such  presence  of  mind  as  well 
as  power  of  speech  in  debate,  as  to  draw  to  him 
the  attention  of  leading  public  men  and  prepare  the 
way  for  his  nomination  to  Congress,  which  was 
perhaps  secured  by  the  success  of  his  Phi  Beta 
Kappa  address. 

In  Congress,  he  sustained  his  reputation  as  an  ora 
tor,  but  did  not  establish  a  reputation  as  a  debater. 
Whether  he  could  have  succeeded,  in  any  assembly, 
in  the  conflicts  of  extemporaneous  speech,  I  do  not 
undertake  to  say;  but  the  House  of  Representatives, 
impaired  in  its  character  by  an  influx  of  a  kind  of 
ruffianism  which  came  in  from  the  South  and  South 
west,  was  not  as  favorable  a  field  for  his  peculiar 
qualities,  certainly,  as  the  Board  of  Overseers.  He 
left,  however,  the  reputation  of  a  learned,  hard-work 
ing,  faithful  publicist  and  legislator.  Always  upon 
the  Committee  on  Foreign  Relations,  he  was  the  au 
thor  of  its  celebrated  report  on  the  Panama  Mission, 
the  leading  topic  of  the  day;  and  distinguished  him 
self  as  an  advocate  of  Greek  independence.  He 
took  an  active  part  in  the  Georgia  controversy,  al 
ways  and  earnestly  supporting  the  unpopular  and 
losing  cause  of  the  Cherokee  Indians,  whom  not 
even  the  decree  of  the  Supreme  Court,  which  the 
President  did  not  attempt  to  execute,  could  protect 
against  the  rapacity  of  Georgia.  He  served  upon 
the  Committee  on  the  Library  and  Public  Buildings, 
of  which,  it  may  be  well  supposed,  he  was  a  most 
useful  member. 

From    Congress,    he    passed    to    the    chair    of    the 


ADDRESS. 

chief  magistracy  of  Massachusetts.  He  held  the  of 
fice  of  Governor  for  four  years,  during  which  were 
begun  and  completed  some  of  the  most  important 
acts  of  our  State  policy,  for  which  we  are  largely 
indebted  to  his  enlightened  and  earnest  support. 
Among  these,  I  may  name  the  establishment  of  the 
Board  of  Education,  of  the  system  of  Normal  Schools, 
the  agricultural  and  scientific  Surveys  of  the  State, 
the  revision  of  our  Statute  Law,  and  the  subscrip 
tion  of  the  State  to  the  Western  Railroad. 

At  the  close  of  his  last  term,  in  1840,  he  sailed 
for  Europe,  for  the  benefit  of  the  health  of  a  member 
of  his  family.  While  in  the  south  of  Italy,  in  1841, 
he  was  appointed  Minister  at  the  Court  of  St.  James, 
and  repaired  to  London  to  find  a  larger  accumulation 
of  difficult  and  critical  questions  than  has  ever  fallen 
upon  one  of  our  ministers,  except  it  be  the  present. 
Every  foot  of  the  boundary  line  between  us  and  the 
British  provinces  was  in  dispute,  from  the  Bay  of 
Fundy  to  the  Lake  of  the  Woods.  The  militia  from 
Maine  and  New  Brunswick  were  under  arms,  and  the 
danger  was  increased  and  the  questions  complicated 
by  the  burning  of  the  Caroline  and  the  arrest  and 
trial  of  McLeod.  Lord  Aberdeen,  the  Secretary  for 
Foreign  Affairs,  had  put  forth  a  claim  of  a  right  to 
visit  vessels  of  other  nations  suspected  of  being  en 
gaged  in  the  slave-trade.  Our  fisheries  in  the  Bay  of 
Fundy  were  in  dispute,  the  case  of  the  Creole  was 
pending,  and  there  were  delicate  questions  respect 
ing  Oregon  and  Texas.  Such  was  the  confidence  of 
the  administration  in  Mr.  Everett,  that  he  was  left 

40 


ADDRESS. 

to  meet  these  questions  without  specific  instructions. 
The  graceful  and  friendly  act  of  Sir  Robert  Peel, 
then  Prime  Minister,  in  sending  Lord  Ashburton  as 
Minister  Extraordinary  to  Washington,  removed  the 
boundary  question,  and  incidentally  that  of  the  right 
of  visit,  from  Mr.  Everett's  cognizance  ;  but  all  the 
questions  that  he  dealt  with  he  treated  as  a  jurist, 
a  scholar,  and  a  thorough  patriot. 

In  1845,  Mr.  Everett  returned  from  England,  and 
was  elected  President  of  our  University;  and,  on  the 
spot  where  I  now  have  the  privilege  to  stand,  he 
delivered  that  inaugural  address,  which  should  be  the 
pride  and  study  of  American  scholars.  Those  who 
heard  it  will  not  fail  to  recall  with  me  his  recitation 
of  that  passage-  from  Cicero  respecting  Natura  sine 
Doctrina  and  Doctrina  sine  Natura,  in  a  style  so  ad 
mirable,  that  there  was  nothing  left  for  a  hearer  but 
to  exclaim, — Could  Cicero  have  done  it  better? 

On  this  occasion,  there  was  an  occurrence  which 
put  suddenly  to  the  severest  test  the  equanimity  and 
ready  resources  of  Mr.  Everett.  The  day  and  place 
were  his  and  his  only.  The  crowded  assembly  waited 
for  his  word.  He  rose,  and  advanced  to  the  front  of 
the  platform,  and  was  received  with  gratifying  ap 
plause.  As  he  was  about  to  begin,  the  applause  re 
ceived  a  sudden  and  marked  acceleration,  and  rose 
higher  and  higher  into  a  tumult  of  cheers.  Mr.  Ever 
ett  felt  that  something  more  than  his  welcome  had 
caused  this;  and  turning,  he  saw,  just  at  that  opening 
behind  your  seat,  Mr.  Mayor,  the  majestic  presence  of 
Daniel  Webster!  The  reception  of  Mr.  Webster  had 

F  41 


ADDRESS. 

additional  force  given  to  it  from  the  fact  that  he 
had  just  returned  from  his  conflict  in  Congress  with 
Charles  Jared  Ingersoll,  who  had  made  an  attack  up 
on  his  character,  and  that  this,  his  first  appearance 
among  us  since,  was  altogether  unexpected.  I  had 
heard  Mr.  Everett's  readiness  of  resource  called  in 
question.  I  looked  —  all  must  have  looked — to  see 
how  he  would  meet  this  embarrassment.  He  turned 
again  to  the  audience,  cast  his  eyes  slowly  round 
the  assembly,  wdth  a  look  of  the  utmost  grati 
fication,  seemed  to  gather  their  applause  in  his 
arms,  and,  turning  about,  to  lay  it  ministerially  at 
the  feet  of  Mr.  Webster,  saying  to  him,  as  I  re 
member, — I  wish,  sir,  that  I  could  at  once  assert  the 
authority  that  has  just  been  conferred  upon  me,  and 
"  auctoritate  mihi  cornmissa,"  declare  to  the  audi 
ence,  "  exspectatur  oratio  in  lingua  vernacula,  a 
Webster."  But  I  suppose,  sir,  your  convenience  and 
.the  arrangements  made  by  others  render  it  expedi 
ent  that  I  should  speak  myself, — at  least  at  first. 

You  will  agree  with  me  that  the  exigency  was  as 
embarrassing  as  it  was  sudden.  How  could  self-pos 
session  escape  from  it  more  gracefully  ! 

As  President,  his  success  was  equivocal.  We  have 
been  told  that  at  the  time  of  his  appointment  he  was 
thought  eminently  fitted  for  the  post  by  the  entire 
community,  with  but  one  exception,  and  that  an  im 
portant  one,  for  it  was  himself.  Deep  as  was  his  in 
terest  in  the  University  and  in  academic  life  and 
learning,  he  knew  the  duties  of  the  office,  and 
doubted  his  fitness  for  their  discharge.  His  ideal  of 


4DDRESS. 

a  student's  purpose  and  achievement  was  high.  He 
knew  what  he  himself  had  felt  and  done,  expected 
too  much,  and  suffered  too  much  from  disappoint 
ment.  I  think,  too,  that  he  judged  rightly  in  com 
paring  his  temperament  with  the  duties  which  would 
fall  to  him.  All,  however,  agree  that  his  general 
plans  for  the  University  were  far-seeing,  liberal,  and 
well  laid,  and  many  fruits  have  been  reaped  from 
them  to  this  time.  He  was  especially  careful  for  the 
moral  condition  of  the  students,  and  was  unwearied 
in  his  efforts  to  protect  them  against  temptation,  and 
to  bring  them  under  religious  influence.  He  was 
the  earnest  advocate  of  encouraging  the  psycho 
logical  studies,  which  he  feared  were  being  over 
borne  by  the  natural  and  exact  sciences :  holding 
that  moral  truths  were  in  their  nature  so  superior, 
that  the  slightest  of  them  were  of  more  value  than 
all  facts  or  theories  that  begin  and  end  in  material 
objects  and  interests. 

In  1852,  Mr.  Webster,  with  failing  health  and  bro 
ken  spirits,  came  home  to  Marshfield,  turned  his  face 
to  the  wall,  and  died.  A  telegraphic  despatch  sum 
moned  Mr.  Everett  to  Washington,  to  take  charge  of 
the  Department  of  State.  Mr.  Webster's  long  illness 
had  left  an  accumulation  of  business  and  some  dis 
order  in  the  department.  Mr.  Everett  applied  him 
self  to  his  work  with  his  habitual  laboriousness  and 
system,  and  established  rules  which  have  been  found 
useful  in  the  despatch  of  business.  Within  a  few  days 
after  taking  the  portfolio,  he  prepared  his  answer  to 
Lord  John  Russel,  on  the  subject  of  a  tripartite 

43 


ADDRESS. 

alliance.  Had  he  done  nothing  else,  that  letter 
would  have  established  his  reputation  as  a  publicist, 
a  scholar,  and  a  thorough,  uncompromising  American. 
The  election  of  Mr.  Pierce  to  the  presidency,  who 
had  not  Mr.  Everett's  support,  ended  his  term  of 
office  on  the  4th  of  March,  1853;  and  on  that  day  he 
stepped  from  the  Department  of  State  to  the  Senate, 
to  which  he  had  been  elected  by  the  Legislature  of 
Massachusetts.  Hardly  had  he  taken  his  seat,  when 
the  discussion  arose  on  the  Clayton-Bulwer  Treaty,  in 
which  he  was  obliged  to  encounter  Mr.  Douglas,  ad 
mitted  by  all  to  be  one  of  the  most  formidable,  and 
thought  by  many  not  the  most  scrupulous,  of  debat 
ers.  If  one  may  judge  by  the  reports  in  the  Con 
gressional  Globe,  Mr.  Everett  bore  his  part  manfully 
and  well.  It  was  in  this  debate  that,  addressing  Mr. 
Douglas,  he  made  his  celebrated  plea  for  twenty-five 
more  years  of  peace.  He  there  gave  the  first  signs 
of  his  apprehension  that  a  spirit  of  military  aggran 
dizement  and  conquest  might  possess  the  country,  to 
its  ruin.  From  the  enlargement  of  our  country  by 
the  peaceful  operation  of  natural  causes,  he  enter 
tained  no  fears;  but  he  did  fear  lest  our  simple,  electo 
ral,  representative  system  might  not  stand  the  stress 
of  military  aggrandizement  and  conquest.  He  drew  a 
picture  of  what  this  country  might  be  after  twenty- 
five  years  of  peace, — the  development  of  all  its  ma 
terial  wealth,  its  multiform  industries,  the  spread  of 
education  and  the  advancement  of  knowledge,  with 
the  necessary  military  and  naval  science  duly  culti 
vated, —  a  people  capable  of  bearing  arms,  a  treasury 

44 


ADDRESS. 

without  debt  or  heavy  taxation,  and  the  devoted  and 
reasoning  attachment  of  the  people  to  their  govern 
ment, —  and  declared,  that  if  then  a  just  war  must 
be  made,  such  a  people  would  be  invincible. 

The  next  year,  evil  and  in  an  evil  hour,  Mr. 
Douglas  introduced  his  amendment  to  the  Kansas- 
Nebraska  Bill.  Mr.  Everett  joined  earnestly  and  elo 
quently  in  the  resistance  to  that  measure.  He  saw 
in  it  the  political  and  territorial  advance  of  slavery 
and  the  receding  of  freedom,  and  was  filled  with 
gloomy  apprehensions  of  a  conflict  to  come.  On  the 
test  vote,  upon  the  adoption  of  the  amendment,  Mr. 
Everett  voted  against  it,  with  Mr.  Seward,  Mr.  Sum- 
ner,  Mr.  Chase,  and  six  others.  So  desirous  was  he 
to  stand  on  the  record  against  it  on  every  occasion, 
that  when  the  final  vote  was  taken  on  the  passage 
of  the  general  bill,  which  was  but  a  formal  vote,  he 
remained  in  the  Senate,  though  in  feeble  health,  suf 
fering  in  body,  until  nearly  four  o'clock  in  the  morn 
ing,  and  then  retired  for  a  little  rest,  upon  an  under 
standing,  as  he  supposed,  that  the  vote  would  not  be 
taken  that  night.  The  next  day  he  returned  to  find 
the  bill  passed,  and  asked  leave  to  record  his  name 
against  it,  stating  the  circumstances  of  his  absence. 
Mr.  Clayton  made  a  like  request.  It  required  unan 
imous  consent.  Mr.  Dodge,  of  Iowa,  made  the  un 
gracious  objection,  and  the  names  were  not  entered. 
In  May  of  that  year,  by  advice  of  his  physician,  and 
unwilling  to  perform  imperfectly  the  duties  of  such 
a  post,  he  resigned  his  seat.  With  this  ended  his 
official  public  life. 


ADDRESS. 

But  how  can  I  close  a  notice  of  his  public  life 
without  alluding  to  that  test  by  which  posterity  will 
judge  American  statesmen  of  the  last  twenty  years, 
-  the  question,  with  what  wisdom,  sagacity,  self- 
command,  and  courage  have  they  met  the  subject 
of  slavery  ?  Being  of  the  number  of  those  who  dis 
approve,  nay,  who  condemn,  the  course  of  concession 
and  compromise  to  which  Mr.  Everett  inclined, — 
and  that,  they  knew  full  well  who  gave  me  public 
leave  to  speak  of  him, — I  feel  the  more  bound  to 
render  to  Mr.  Everett,  on  this  point,  the  justice  that 
I  think  his  due.  Believing  always,  and  more  firmly 
now  than  ever,  that  every  concession  made  or  of 
fered  to  slavery,  since  the  adoption  of  the  Constitu 
tion,  has  but  encouraged  its  arrogance,  beckoned  it 
on  in  its  advance  toward  imperial  powers,  and  em 
boldened  it  for  the  final  conflict;  believing  that  the 
only  pacificator,  if  any  were  possible,  was  a  thorough 
understanding,  from  the  beginning,  that  no  conces 
sions  could  be  expected ;  I  can  yet  understand,  I 
think,  the  state  of  mind  of  Mr.  Everett.  We  ought 
not  only  to  look  at  the  subject  from  his  point  of 
view,  as  the  phrase  is,  but  from  his  interior  state. 

I  have  endeavored  to  impress  you  with  the  convic 
tion  which  I  feel  myself,  of  the  immense  importance 
Mr.  Everett  attached  to  the  preservation  of  our  na 
tional  system  ;  to  show  you  that  he  returned  deeply 
impressed  with  this  from  Europe;  that  it  was  the  re 
sult  of  all  his  studies  and  observations;  that  it  was  the 
theme  of  his  first  public  discourse,  and  the  inspiration 
with  which  he  entered  public  life  forty  years  ago.  Tt 

4G 


ADDRESS.      ' 

was  not  pride  of  empire,  nor  merely  patriotism,  but 
a  solemn  conviction  that  it  was  the  one  great  experi 
ment,  in  the  fulness  of  time,  and  under  the  most 
favorable  circumstances  possible,  for  the  widest  and 
highest  moral  and  intellectual  development  of  human 
nature.  To  him,  it  was  also  the  peacemaker  and 
civil izer  of  the  continent.  He  had  no  faith  that  the 
institutions  of  the  States  could  be  preserved,  if  the 
general  government  failed.  He  knew  that  it  might 
fail.  He  knew  it  was  an  institution  of  men,  to  be 
managed  by  men ;  and  he  knew  too  much  of  the 
passions  and  weaknesses  of  human  nature  to  be  of  the 
number  of  those  who  think  that  a  vast  people  can 
make  and  unmake  society  and  fundamental  institu 
tions,  at  their  pleasure,  without  loss  or  peril.  He  had 
always  had  before  him  a  vivid,  some  may  think  a 
morbid,  but  certainly  an  honest,  impression  of  the 
direful  consequences  of  failure.  As  long  ago  as  1835, 
at  Amherst,  he  said,  "If  this  great  experiment  of  ra 
tional  liberty  shall  here  be  permitted  to  fail,  I  know 
not  when  or  where,  among  the  sons  of  Adam,  it  will 
ever  be  resumed."  In  1851,  in  New  York,  fourteen 
years  ago  this  day,  he  declared  "  Secession  is  war, — 
must  be  war;"  and  of  all  wars,  civil  war,  and  of  all 
places  for  civil  war,  in  the  republic  of  America!  He 
said  then,  and  it  was  always  his  belief,  that  if  se 
cession  was  attempted,  the  American  people  would 
have  before  them  but  this  alternative, — disintegration 
or  civil  war.  Secession,  acquiesced  in  or  yielded  to, 
ended  the  power  and  authority  of  the  general  govern 
ment;  and  that  gone,  he  saw  no  security  for  the  States 


ADDRESS. 

themselves.  He  had  seen  the  Supreme  Court  settling 
the  boundary  line  between  Massachusetts  and  Rhode 
Island  upon  paper  titles,  as  it  would  have  determined 
the  disputed  boundaries  of  farms  in  a  civil  action; 
but,  the  central  authority  abolished,  passions  excited, 
vast  interests  at  stake,  he  did  not  believe  that  a  peo 
ple  who  had  overthrown  or  permitted  to  perish  a  Con 
stitution  given  them  by  the  wisdom  of  Washington, 
Hamilton,  Madison,  and  Jay,  would  respect  arbitrary, 
surveyor's  lines  run  on  parchment  charters  from 
dead  Annes  and  Elizabeths.  His  temperament  may 
have  led  him  to  see  dangers  more  vividly  than  pos 
sible  resources;  but  to  him  they  were  real.  As  the 
Israelite,  wandering  in  the  desert,  to  the  ark  of  the 
covenant,  as  the  Jew  to  Jerusalem,  as  the  Mussulman 
to  Mecca,  so  did  he  look  to  our  Constitution  and 
Union.  He  had  always  thought  the  danger  immi 
nent,  as  well  as  great.  In  1856,  he  said,  privately, — 
he  did  not  think  it  wise  to  publish  the  opinion, 
—  that  that  was  probably  the  last  Presidential  elec 
tion  which  would  be  acquiesced  in.  He  did  not 
make  the  mistake  of  underrating  the  power  or  the 
purpose  of  Southern  society.  He  believed  that  if 
they  entered  on  the  course  of  secession,  and  the 
collision  occurred,  it  was  war, — war  in  its  most  vast 
proportions,  and  with  all  its  hazards. 

In  making  up  a  tribunal  to  pass  judgment  on  the 
course  of  Mr.  Everett,  there  are  classes  of  persons  who 
may  well  be  subject  to  "challenge  for  cause."  Those 
who  did  not  value  the  Union  as  he  did,  can  hardly 
judge  him  in  the  price  he  would  pay  for  its  ransom. 

48 


ADDRESS. 

Those  who  have  the  pleasing  fancy  that  there  is 
little  cost  or  risk  in  resolving  society  into  its  orig 
inal  elements,  to  make  it  over  again  at  our  will,  are 
hardly  capable  of  placing  themselves  at  his  point  of 
view.  They,  too,  may  well  be  counted  out,  and  with 
them  would  go  the  large  majority  of  the  North,  who 
did  not  believe  the  danger  real,  or,  if  real,  great,— 
who  underrated  the  slave-power,  in  its  capabilities 
and  its  purposes. 

On  the  other  hand,  Mr.  Everett  is  not  to  be  con 
founded  with  those  who  were  indifferent  to  the 
concessions  proposed,  —  with  that  great  number,  far 
too  great,  who,  first  palliating  slavery,  then  excus 
ing  it,  passed  at  last  to  justification  and  sympathy. 
Whatever  he  may  have  said  or  thought,  in  youth,  of 
our  political  relations  with  slavery, — when  slavery 
was  but  a  local  institution,  not  justified  but  rather 
excused  where  it  existed,  and  not  suspected  of  look 
ing  to  imperial  power, — his  opinions  as  to  slavery 
itself,  in  its  moral  aspects,  were  never  equivocal. 
His  position  was  that  of  compromise,  but  not  of 
ambiguity. 

In  1853,  at  Washington,  when  he  was  Secretary 
of  State,  at  the  period  of  the  most  extreme  sen 
sitiveness  and  extravagant  demands  of  the  slave- 
power,  he  delivered  an  address  before  the  Colo 
nization  Society,  in  which  he  controverted  their 
fundamental  principle  with  all  the  powers  which 
he  possessed.  He  urged  that  the  negro  must  and 
could  civilize  Africa.  He  met  the  argument  that 
the  negro  was  not  capable  of  self-government,  —  of 
«  49 


ADDRESS. 

constructing  and  maintaining  a  civilized  empire,  — 
that  he  is  essentially  inferior  and  must  be  governed 
by  the  white,  by  saying,  "  I  do  not  believe  it." 
He  not  only  contended  that,  as  a  human  being,  the 
negro  was  substantially  equal,  but  he  drew  proofs 
from  all  history,  and  discredited  the  assertion  of  his 
incapacity  by  showing  that  races  had  been  enslaved 
and  as  degraded  as  the  negro,  yet  had  risen  to  be 
among  the  master-races  of  the  globe.  He  wrote  the 
biography  of  Abdul  Rahaman,  an  African  prince,  a 
scholar,  and  a  prince  in  manners,  who,  having  been 
made  captive  in  some  disastrous  battle  and  sold  into 
slavery,  was  met,  years  afterwards,  in  the  streets 
of  a  town  in  Tennessee,  in  the  garb  and  duties  of 
a  slave, —  a  coincidence  that  would  have  seemed 
unnatural  in  fiction,  —  by  an  American  citizen,  who 
had  been  a  guest  at  his  father's  court  when  trav 
elling  in  the  interior  of  Africa.  I  scarcely  know  a 
clearer  proof  of  what  slavery  is  than  the  fact  that 
neither  by  law  nor  by  money,  nor  by  persuasion, 
though  multitudes  joined  in  it,  could  this  prince  be 
rescued  from  bondage  to  a  man  who  had  paid  for 
him  on  the  auction-block.  He  was  liberated  it  is 
true,  at  last,  and  returned  to  his  native  land,  but 
after  many  years  of  effort,  and  not  by  any  course 
for  which  the  slave-system  made  provision. 

I  think  Mr.  Everett  knew  the  nature  of  slavery, 
that  he  felt  its  injustice,  and  the  deplorable  con 
sequences  that  must  follow  in  its  train.  When  he 
proposed  to  concede  anything  to  it,  he  knew  what 
he  conceded.  He  knew  why  he  conceded.  He 


ADDRESS. 

weighed  out  the  concessions  scrupulously  and  pain 
fully.  He  took  no  satisfaction  in  any  of  the  com 
promises  which  had  been  or  were  to  be  made  with 
it;  still  less  did  he  ever  treat  them  with  levity,  or 
profess  to  perform  their  duties  with  alacrity.  He 
did  not  join  the  Democratic  party,  whatever  the 
temptation,  because  he  believed,  —  I  speak  of  a  fact 
of  history,  —  I  would  not  take  advantage  of  my 
position  to-day  to  wound  the  susceptibilities  of  any 
man,  —  because  it  was  his  belief  that  that  party  had 
become  too  much  the  ally  of  the  slave-power.  He 
preferred  to  be  without  a  party.  He  looked  over 
the  whole  field.  He  balanced  vast  moral  consid 
erations.  For  purposes  which  he  understood,  he 
was  willing  to  make  concessions  which  he  appre 
ciated. 

Among  men  capable  of  understanding  such  vast 
questions,  and  whose  objects  are  no  other  than  the 
public  good,  the  dividing  line  is  not  one  of  logic, 
but  of  temperament.  It  is,  as  Macaulay  said  of 
Whig  and  Tory  at  one  time  in  England,  a  good 
deal  a  question  of  Natural  History.  Without  un 
dertaking  to  analyze  and  classify  those  qualities  of 
Mr.  Everett,  physical  and  moral,  which  go  to  make 
up  what  we  call,  for  convenience,  the  tempera 
ment,  one  cannot  but  be  struck  by  the  contrast 
between  him  and  another  statesman  of  Massachu 
setts,  his  near  neighbor  in  birth  and  residence, 
—  John  Quiii cy  Adams,  —  of  whom  Mr.  Choate 
once  playfully  said,  in  the  privacy  of  his  study, 
what  has  passed  into  public  biography,  — "  What  an 


ADDRESS. 

antagonist  he  was !  An  instinct  for  the  jugular  and 
carotid  artery  equal  to  that  of  any  of  the  carnivo 
rous  animals ; "  and  whom  Mr.  Everett  described 
as  one  whose  natural  place  would  have  been  at 
the  weather  yard-arm  in  a  tempest,  or  leading  the 
forlorn  hope  through  the  deadly  imminent  breach. 

Mr.  Everett  is  also  fairly  entitled  to  be  judged 
as  a  peace  man.  I  do  not  mean,  in  the  formal 
and  technical  sense,  but  in  spirit  and  in  truth,  a 
peace  man.  His  weapons  were  the  tongue  and 
the  pen.  He  knew  that  the  tongue  was  a  sharp 
sword,  cutting  deeper  than  the  life  of  the  body, 
and  the  pen  an  arrow,  hurting  past  all  surgery. 
He  used  these  his  weapons  with  the  self-denial 
and  the  consideration  of  a  true  philanthropist.  He 
believed  that  those  who  make  war  are  as  respon 
sible  as  those  who  fight  war,  whether  in  private 
society  or  in  the  society  of  nations.  He  believed 
that  the  Christian  benediction  upon  the  peace 
maker  might  fall  upon  many  a  man  who,  at  the 
call  of  society  and  in  a  just  cause,  gasped  out  his 
life  in  the  roar  of  battle,  and  yet  be  forfeited 
by  those,  who,  drawing  some  formal  distinction 
about  the  personal  use  of  sword  and  musket,  yet 
allow  themselves  to  wield  the  weapons  of  the  tongue 
and  the  pen  in  a  spirit  which,  if  not  repressed  in 
actual  warfare,  would  carry  it  back  to  the  days  of 
barbarism.  Cast  your  eyes  over  all  he  has  written, 
recall  whatever  he  has  spoken,  and  tell  me  whether 
you  find  one  word  which  affects  his  right  to  be 
judged,  in  spirit  and  in  truth,  as  a  man  of  peace. 


ADDRESS. 

Mr.  Everett  knew  that  wars  were  caused  as  of 
ten  by  estranged  feeling  as  by  actual  wrongs ;  and 
it  seemed  to  him  that  there  was  one  chord  of 
common  sympathy  between  North  and  South  which 
might  yet  be  touched  with  some  hope  of  success, — 
the  common  love  and  respect  for  the  memory  of 
Washington.  He  prepared  a  discourse  upon  the 
character  of  Washington,  to  be  delivered  throughout 
the  country,  in  aid  of  the  fund  for  the  purchase  of 
Mount  Yernon.  As  a  rhetorical  composition,  adapted 
for  declamation  in  public,  by  a  master  of  elocution, 
it  probably  has  not  its  superior  in  American  liter 
ature.  He  spoke  it  in  all  parts  of  the  country, 
north,  south,  east,  and  west,  to  the  largest  and 
most  brilliant  audiences,  in  all,  no  less  than  one 
hundred  and  twenty-nine  times ;  obtaining,  by  the 
sale  of  tickets  of  admission,  about  $50,000  for  the 
benefit  of  the  fund.  What  a  splendid  realization 
of  the  bright  vision  of  his  youth,  —  of  a  common 
language  and  extended  education,  —  when  we  con 
sider  that  this  discourse  has  been  heard  by  more 
men  and  women  than  ever  listened  to  any  one 
discourse  by  any  one  man,  so  far  as  we  know, 
since  the  beginning  of  time  ! 

The  times  were  beyond  the  reach  of  such  sedatives 
as  this.  But  he  had  done  what  he  could.  He  felt 
that  he  was  standing  between  earnest  and  strong 
parties,  and  that  his  course  was  no  longer  popular,  and 
was  subjecting  him  to  the  suspicion  of  timidity  and 
inadequate  instincts  and  opinions.  In  an  oration  on 
the  4th  of  July,  at  Boston,  in  1858,  he  said,  "I  know 


ADDRESS. 

that  this  has  ceased  to  be  a  popular  strain;  but  I 
willingly  accept  the  unpopularity.  I  know  that  in 
certain  quarters  '  Union-saving '  is  treated  with  real 
or  affected  contempt.  I  am  content  to  share  in  the 
ridicule  attached  to  anxiety  for  the  preservation  of 
the  Union."  His  tone  at  this  period  was  always 
solemn,  and  not  hopeful.  In  I860,  he  accepted  the 
nomination  for  Vice-President  from  a  party  organized 
upon  a  principle  of  compromise  between  the  Repub 
licans  and  the  Democrats.  He  thought  that  the 
Democratic  party  had  gone  too  far  in  allying  itself 
with  the  slave-power,  and  that  the  Republicans  were 
unreasonable  in  refusing  all  concessions.  I  do  not 
think  this  nomination  could  have  had  much  attrac 
tion  for  him,  or  that  he  had  much  hope  of  its 
success. 

At  length,  the  blow  was  struck ;  and  not  by  us ! 
The  war  was  begun  by  the  slave-power  in  rebel 
lion.  He  took  his  position  instantly.  It  was  neither 
equivocal  nor  compromising.  He  threw  the  whole 
weight  of  his  character,  influence,  and  powers  mto 
the  scale  for  the  national  life.  He  discarded  all 
party  connections;  put  at  hazard  life-long  friend 
ships  ;  refused  all  criticisms  on  details  of  men  and 
measures,  military  or  civil;  and  gave  to  the  admin 
istration  a  generous  and  thorough-going  support.  He 
urged  the  war  —  thorough,  earnest  war,  with  all  the 
powers  of  war  —  for  the  preservation  of  the  Union. 
As  for  slavery,  while  he  would  not  strike  a  blow 
at  that,  under  a  pretence  of  military  necessity,  in 
violation  of  what  is  fundamental  in  our  constitution, 

54 


ADDRESS. 

yet,  when  the  administration  decided,  in  good  faith, 
that  such  a  military  necessity  did  exist,  he  sustained 
both  the  authority  and  the  policy  of  the  government. 
It  has  been  said,  very  commonly,  that  in  all 
this  Mr.  Everett  had  undergone  a  great  change, 
that  he  had,  in  fact,  made  a  revolution  in  his 
opinions.  I  do  not  so  regard  it.  His  course,  the 
last  four  years,  seems  to  me  to  have  been  the  log 
ical  result  of  the  convictions  and  purposes  we  have 
found  possessing  him  forty  years  before,  and  up  to 
the  moment  the  war  began.  That  same  immense  im 
portance  which  he  attached  to  the  preservation  of  our 
system,  not  for  pride  nor  for  patriotism  only,  but  for 
the  good  of  the  human  race  ;  that  same  belief  in  the 
reality  and  magnitude  of  the  danger  to  the  Union  ; 
that  conviction  that  secession  must  be  war,  by  which 
he  had  prepared  his  mind  for  the  result,  and  was 
not  taken  by  surprise ;  that  same  conviction  of  the 
military  and  political  power  of  slavery ;  that  same 
conviction  that  secession,  acquiesced  in  or  yielded 
to,  was  disintegration,  was  the  end  of  our  national 
system,  and  perilled  the  existence  of  the  States 
themselves,  and  opened  the  flood-gates  for  all  those 
consequences  which  he  most  feared  and  detested  for 
human  nature ;  that  same  conviction  that  war,  dread 
ful  as  it  is,  may  sometimes  be  just  and  necessary ; 
all  the  convictions  and  purposes  which  inspired  his 
tongue  in  youth  and  early  manhood,  —  which  per 
suaded  him  to  concessions  while  there  was  a  hope 
of  averting  the  catastrophe,  —  these  same  convictions, 
when  the  war  had  begun,  found  him  poised,  collected, 


ADDRESS. 


unsurprised,  satisfied  in  understanding  and  in  con 
science  that  the  duty  to  preserve  the  Union  was  a 
paramount  duty,  that  compromise  with  Secession  was 
impossible,  that  the  war  must  be  fought  through, 
to  its  end.  He  had  no  new  reasons  to  give.  His 
attempts  to  avert  and  to  assuage  may  have  been 
useless.  That  is  matter  of  opinion.  It  is  matter  of 
opinion,  too,  whether  they  were  wise  or  brave ;  but 
his  course,  when  the  catastrophe  came,  was  con 
sistent  with  his  course  from  the  beginning.  The 
surgeon  who  sees  that  a  capital  operation  may  be 
necessary,  but  fears  that  it  may  be  fatal  to  life, 
may  put  it  off  too  long,  and  dally  with  palliatives 
worse  than  unavailing ;  but  it  would  be  a  mistake 
of  terms  to  call  him  inconsistent  for  using  the 
knife  resolutely  when  he  sees  it  unavoidable. 

I  think,  too,  —  many  have  thought,  —  that  from 
the  moment  the  point  was  reached  beyond  which 
slavery  was  no  longer  to  be  respected,  Mr.  Everett 
seemed  to  enter  upon  a  new  life.  Whatever  else 
the  war  had  emancipated,  it  had  emancipated  him. 
He  was  no  longer  bound  by  obligations  of  compact, 
or  law,  or  policy,  to  the  slave-power.  His  tone 
recovered  something  of  the  cheer  and  elation  of 
his  youth.  He  seemed  to  cry,  in  the  words  of 
ancient  Church  for  thousands  of  years,  "LAQUEUS 

CONTR1TUS    EST,    ET    NOS    LIBERATI    SUMUS." 

In  this  war,  he  did  not  wait  for  conscription  or 
for  bounty.  He  enlisted  at  once  in  the  only  arm  of 
the  service  for  which  his  years  had  left  him  fitted. 
He  felt,  as  he  so  touchingly  said  in  his  last  public 

56 


A  l>  1>  R  A'  -S>. 

words,  at  the  meeting  for  the  Savannah  sufferers,  in 
Fane  nil  Hall,  "  I  am  an  old  man.  There  is  nothing 
of  me  left  with  which  I  can  serve  my  country,  except 
my  lips."  He  felt  that  the  understanding  and  con 
science  of  the  people  must  be  satisfied  on  the  subject 
of  this  war.  He  knew  that  false  doctrines  of  State 
rights  had  been  so  fostered  as  to  lead  some  to  doubt 
our  right  to  subdue  a  rebellion  begun  in  the  name 
of  a  State.  He  knew  that  party  spirit,  the  blame 
of  which  lay  on  both  sides,  crippled  the  power  of  the 
government.  He  felt  that  long  association  with  the 
slave-power  and  its  leaders,  in  political  party,  had 
produced,  in  many,  a  latent  sympathy  which  blinded 
them  to  the  sin  of  the  rebellion,  and  made  them  cold 
in  their  country's  cause.  He  determined  to  devote 
whatever  he  had  of  eloquence,  of  logic,  of  learning, 
to  the  instruction  and  persuasion  of  the  public  mind 
and  conscience;  in  his  own  words,  in  1824,  to 
"  disdain  mean  conceptions,  and  speak  a  noble  word 
which  will  touch  the  heart  of  a  great  people."  He 
prepared  a  speech  upon  the  character  of  the  war. 
Its  object  was  to  show  the  sin  of  the  rebellion,  its 
unprovoked  and  causeless  character ;  to  show  the  ne 
cessity  and  rightfulness  of  the  war,  and  to  enforce 
the  duty  of  a  generous,  self-sacrificing,  earnest  sup 
port  of  the  government.  This  speech  has  never  been 
printed.  A  few  days  since,  I  had  the  pleasure  of 
holding  the  manuscript  in  my  hand.  It  is  written 
in  his  careful  handwriting,  and  on  the  back  he 
had  noted  the  places  and  dates  of  its  delivery.  It 
was  spoken  first  in  Boston,  on  the  16th  October, 

H  57 


ADDRESS. 

1861,  and  then  no  less  than  sixty  times  in  about 
thirty  weeks.  It  is  known  that  he  was  infirm  in 
health,  subject  to  sudden  and  painful  attacks,  pecu 
liarly  depressing  when  away  from  home  and  friends, 
and  aggravated  by  journey  ings.  He  was  bowed 
also  by  domestic  bereavement.  Yet,  through  the 
long  winter,  in  weariness  and  painfulness,  in  journey- 
ings  oft,  and  not  without  peril  to  life,  he  traversed 
the  country  upon  his  mission,  speaking  in  nearly 
every  large  city  not  within  the  enemy's  lines,  —  in 
Baltimore  and  Washington,  in  St.  Louis,  Detroit, 
Chicago,  Milwaukie,  Davenport,  Dubuque,  and  at  St. 
Paul,  at  the  head-waters  of  the  Mississippi.  We  can 
imagine  his  sensations  when  he,  the  orator  of  the 
Phi  Beta  in  1824,  stood  at  the  foot  of  the  falls  of 
St.  Anthony,  pleading  the  cause  of  his  country,  in 
the  vernacular  tongue,  before  a  large  and  culti 
vated  resident  audience,  where,  twenty  years  after 
his  Phi  Beta  Kappa  address,  nothing  was  to  be 
seen  but  limitless  prairies  of  the  buffalo,  forests  of 
wolves,  and  an  intersection  of  the  war-paths  of  the 
Sioux  and  the  Chippewas. 

From  the  beginning  of  the  war,  Mr.  Everett  had 
carefully  abstained  from  all  party  action.  He  said 
that  if  he  could  exert  any  influence,  it  must  be  in 
dependently  of  political  party.  But  in  1864,  when 
candidates  had  been  named  and  purposes  declared, 
he  came  to  the  opinion  that  the  election  was  not 
a  question  of  political  party.  He  was  convinced 
that  the  continuance  of  the  administration,  by  the 
reelection  of  Mr.  Lincoln,  was,  to  all  human  view, 

58 


.1  />/>UESS. 


the  only  course  for  the  preservation  of  the  Union. 
He  made  one  speech  in  Boston,  again  addressing 
himself,  calmly  and  plainly,  with  an  absence  of  all 
attempts  at  mere  rhetorical  effect,  to  the  under 
standing  and  conscience  of  the  people.  On  this 
question,  no  citizen  of  the  republic  had  a  position 
for  influence  like  his.  Not  only  did  his  age,  dis 
tinction,  experience,  public  services,  and  character 
command  respect,  but  his  previous  course  gave  him 
a  peculiar  influence  with  that  large  class  on  the 
middle  ground,  not  intrenched  within  the  party 
lines,  upon  whose  action  the  result  so  largely  de 
pended.  This  speech  was  widely  circulated,  and 
produced  a  great  effect  upon  the  class  of  persons 
to  whom  it  was  addressed.  On  the  second  Monday 
in  November,  he  presided  over  the  electoral  college 
of  Massachusetts,  and  certified  its  vote  for  Mr.  Lin- 
coin.  This  was  the  last  official  act  of  his  life. 

Whatever  difference  of  opinion  may  remain  as  to 
the  Presidential  election,  I  am  persuaded  that  no 
loyal  and  patriotic  man,  looking  at  what  Mr.  Everett 
has  done  during  the  last  four  years,  will  refuse  to 
join  me  in  saying  that,  much  as  Mr.  Everett  owed 
to  his  country,  he  did  not  die  in  its  debt. 

His  public  official  life  had  ended.  But  he  an 
swered  to  every  call  of  benevolence  and  patriot 
ism.  He  was  selected  to  utter  the  national  voice 
at  the  consecration  of  the  cemetery  at  Gettysburg. 
He  made  an  address  at  the  opening  of  the  fair  for 
the  seamen  of  the  navy,  in  Boston.  He  welcomed 
the  officers  and  the  crew  of  the  Kearsarge,  at 


.1  L)  L)  R  E  $  X . 

Faneuil  Hall.  The  loyal  Tennesseans,  among  their 
valleys  and  mountains,  will  pass  down  his  name  with 
gratitude  to  children's  children.  After  a  day  of  la 
bor,  pressed  with  care,  and  so  infirm  in  health  that 
his  absence  might  not  only  have  been  excused  but 
justified,  he  would  not,  could  not  refuse,  —  a  blessed 
instinct  led  him  to  speak  at  Faneuil  Hall  for  the 
sufferers  at  Savannah ;  and  so,  the  Cradle  of  Liberty 
received  his  last  public  utterance ;  so,  he  fitly 
rounded  his  life,  ending,  as  he  began,  a  preacher 
of  the  gospel  of  charity.  It  is  touching  to  think 
that  this  man,  who  had  stood  before  kings  and 
people,  and  held  the  great  arguments  of  public  law 
and  reasons  of  state,  in  the  high  places  of  the 
earth,  at  length  and  at  last  comes  back  to  the 
uttering  of  those  simple,  primitive  precepts  which 
his  mother  had  taught  him  at  her  knee. 

It  is  time,  more  than  time,  that  my  voice  should 
cease.  Yet,  may  we  not  delay  a  moment,  for  the 
satisfaction  of  expressing  our  belief  that  the  fame 
of  Mr.  Everett,  as  a  speaker  and  writer,  has  been 
fairly  earned  and  is  firmly  fixed?  I  do  not  see  why 
it  has  not  been  as  fairly  earned  as  the  painter, 
sculptor,  poet,  or  composer  earns  his.  The  artist 
produces  his  statue  or  picture,  the  poet  his  lyric 
or  epic,  the  composer  his  oratorio  or  symphony,  sub 
mits  it  to  the  judgment  of  time,  and  abides  the  re 
sult.  For  fifty  years,  year  by  year,  Mr.  Everett  has 
submitted  orations,  speeches,  diplomatic  letters,  es 
says,  and  lectures  to  the  judgment  of  his  age, 
and  abided  the  result.  If  that  judgment  has  been 

GO 


-1  1th  HKSS. 

favorable  to  him,  it  cannot  be  attributed  to  fraud, 
accident,  or  surprise.  His  written  and  spoken  style 
has  been  submitted  to  various  tests,  —  the  test  of 
novelty  and  the  test  of  familiarity ;  has  been  ap 
plied  to  great  varieties  of  topics,  in  various  places, 
and  before  two  generations  ;  and  has  survived  the 
changes  and  chances  of  taste  and  opinion.  That 
same  written  style,  which  at  the  first  charmed 
this  critical  community,  was  found,  after  forty 
years,  equal  to  a  contest  with  the  trained  diplo 
matists  of  Europe,  on  the  theatre  of  the  Nations. 
That  elocution,  which  in  the  freshness  of  its 
youth  filled  Brattle  Street,  its  aisles,  ay  to  its 
window-tops,  and  moved  to  a  kind  of  ecstasy  the 
select  audiences  at  Cambridge,  Concord,  and  Plym 
outh,  was  found,  in  its  gray  and  bent  age,  equal 
—  more  equal  than  any  other  —  to  the  exigen 
cies  of  the  most  vast  and  momentous  popular  can 
vass  the  world  ever  saw. 

We  will  not  pause  to  recall  what  is  well  known 
of  his  characteristics, — his  memory,  in  quickness  and 
tenacity  fairly  entitled  to  be  called  wonderful ;  his 
systematic  habits  ;  his  love  of  the  highest  and  best 
topics,  men,  and  books ;  the  singular  purity  of  his 
life,  the  dignity  of  his  manners,  his  decorous  com 
pliance  with  all  the  reasonable  and  many  of  the 
unreasonable  demands  of  society,  his  reverent  partici 
pation  in  Christian  ordinances.  Those  who  remem 
ber,  in  his  address  on  the  character  of  Washington, 
the  loathing  with  which  he  describes  Frederick  the 
Great  displaying  at  once  his  disbelief  in  the  Christian 

01 


ADDRESS. 

doctrine  of  the  resurrection  and  his  contempt  for 
his  species,  by  ordering  his  body  to  be  buried  with 
his  dogs  at  Potsdam,  can  understand  the  sensibility 
with  which  he  must  have  contemplated  such  a  rev 
erent  Christian  burial  as  has  been  accorded  him  by 
this  community.  At  that,  we  take  our  leave  of 
him.  We  cannot  follow  him  further.  But  we  may 
look  into  the  vacancy,  repeating  his  own  words, — 
"After  nature,  after  time,  after  life,  after  death,  we 
reach  those  sweet  fields  beyond  the  swelling  flood, 
where  the  philosophy  of  the  mind  awaits,  at  the 
foot  of  the  Cross,  a  wisdom  higher  than  its  own." 

62 


APPENDIX: 


THE   PROCEEDINGS  OF  THE  CITY  COUNCIL  OP  CAMBRIDGE, 


ON    THE    DECEASE    OF 


EDWARD     EVERETT. 


DEATH    OF    EDWARD    EVERETT. 


AT  a  meeting  of  the  City  Council  of  Cambridge,  January  18,  1865,  the 
Mayor,  Hon.  J.  WARRKX  MERRILL,  made  the  following  communication:  — 

O 

CITY   OF   CAMBRIDGE. 

MAYOR'S  OFFICE,  January  18,  1865. 

GENTLEMEN  OF  THE  CITY  COUNCIL:  Since  we  last  met, 
every  mind  has  been  startled  and  every  heart  saddened  by 
the  announcement  of  the  sudden  decease  of  one  who  was 
formerly  a  resident  of  our  city,  and  whom  we,  in  common 
with  all  our  countrymen,  delighted  to  honor. 

The  Hon.  EDWARD  EVERETT  began  his  career  as  a  public 
speaker  within  the  walls  of  our  honored  University  on  the 
occasion  of  the  visit  of  the  noble  Lafayette,  and  afterwards, 
as  its  President,  added  new  lustre  to  its  fair  fame.  During 
his  residence  with  us  he  took  a  deep  interest  in  our  schools, 
and  was  ever  the  friend  of  popular  education. 

But  it  is  not  from  considerations  of  local  interest  that  we 
are  called  upon  to  honor  his  memory.  The  many  eminent 
positions  in  the  State  and  in  the  nation  which  he  occupied 
and  adorned,  and  the  noble  example  of  public  and  private 
virtue  which  he  gave  us,  alike  move  us  to  love  and  respect 
his  memory  and  to  give  expression  to  these  feelings. 


APPENDIX. 

For  many  years  he  was  engaged  in  political  life,  yet 
during  all  its  strifes  his  opponents  never  questioned  the 
purity  of  his  motives  ;  and  the  nohle  manner  in  which  he 
came  forward  when  traitors  fired  on  the  flag  of  the  Re 
public,  in  support  of  "  the  Constitution  and  the  enforce 
ment  of  the  laws,"  filled  up  the  measure  of  his  fame,  and 
secured  for  him  the  homage  and  gratitude  of  every  loyal 
and  patriotic  American. 

I  do  not  doubt  that  you  will  esteem  it  a  privilege  to  take 
such  action  as  will  give  expression  to  your  feelings  on 
this  sad  occasion,  and  I  content  myself  with  the  sugges 
tion,  that,  as  his  memory  is,  and  will  be  in  all  the  ages  to 
come,  associated  with  that  of  Washington,  as  his  most 
eloquent  eulogist,  you  provide  for  suitable  public  ser 
vices  before  the  citizens  of  Cambridge,  on  the  22d  of  Feb 
ruary  proximo,  in  honor  of  his  memory. 
Respectfully  submitted, 

J.   WARREN  MERRILL,  MAYOR. 


The  foregoing  communication  having  been  read  by  the  Mayor,  the  fol 
lowing  order  was  adopted  in  the  Board  of  Aldermen :  — 

Ix  BOARD  OF  ALDERMEN,  January  18,  1865. 

Ordered,  That  the  communication  of  His  Honor  be  sent 
to  the  other  Board,  and  that  Messrs.  Choate  and  Carter, 
with  such  as  the  Council  may  join,  be  a  committee  to  con 
sider  and  report  what  action  shall  be  taken  by  the  City 
Government  to  testify  their  respect  for  the  memory  of  the 
late  Mr.  Everett. 


The  order  was  adopted  by  the  Common  Council,  in  concurrence,  and 
Messrs.  Fuller,  Sawyer,  and  Blanchard  were  joined  on  said  Committee, 
on  the  part  of  that  Board. 

66 


APPENDIX. 

The  Committee   retired,  and,  after  a  short    time,  submitted   the  follow 
ing  report  and  resolutions  :  — 

IN  BOAUD  OF  ALDERMEN,  January  18,  1865. 
The  Committee  appointed  to  consider  and  report  what 
action  shall  be  taken  by  the  City  Government  to  testify 
their  respect  for  the  memory  of  the  late  Hon.  Edward 
Everett,  submit  a  partial  report.  They  recommend  that 
the  accompanying  resolutions  be  adopted  by  the  two 
branches  of  the  City  Government,  and  ask  for  further  time 
to  consider  what  further  action  should  be  taken  by  the 
City  in  accordance  with  the  suggestion  of  His  Honor  the 

Mayor. 

C.   F.   CHOATE, 

For  the   Committee. 

RESOLUTIONS. 

Whereas,  Since  the  last  meeting  of  the  City  Council,  the 
Hon.  Edward  Everett,  for  many  years  an  honored  citizen 
of  Cambridge,  has  departed  this  life,  deeming  it  due  to  the 
City  and  to  themselves  to  enter  upon  the  records  of  the 
City  their  deep  sense  of  gratitude  for  his  example  and  his 
life,  and  their  grief  for  the  loss  which  they,  in  common 
with  the  Commonwealth  and  the  nation,  have  sustained  in 
his  decease  in  the  maturity  of  his  great  powers  and  the 
fulness  of  his  usefulness: 

Resolved,  That  the  City  Council  of  the  City  of  Cam 
bridge,  gratefully  recognizing  the  services  of  the  deceased 
in  all  the  high  stations  he  was  called  to  fill,  —  his  spot 
less  liCe,  his  varied  learning,  his  matchless  eloquence,  his 
comprehensive  patriotism,  his  philanthropic  labors  for  suf 
fering  humanity,  which  have  made  his  name  and  memory 
a  precious  heirloom  of  the  nation, —  share  in  the  universal 
sorrow  for  a  loss  so  irreparable. 

67 


APPENDIX. 

Resolved,  That  the  City  Council  count  it  a  peculiar 
honor  to  the  City  of  Cambridge  that,  for  so  large  a  portion 
of  Mr.  Everett's  life,  his  home  was  within  its  borders,  and 
remember  and  appreciate  his  ready  services  in  the  cause 
of  public  education  in  the  City  and  his  deep  interest  in  its 
welfare. 

Resolved,  That  His  Honor  the  Mayor  be  requested  to 
cause  the  flags  on  all  the  public  buildings  to  be  raised  at 
half-mast,  and  the  bells  in  the  churches  of  the  City  to  be 
tolled,  on  the  day  of  the  funeral  of  the  deceased. 

Resolved,  That  a  copy  of  these  resolutions  and  of  the 
communication  of  His  Honor  the  Mayor  be  sent  to  the 
family  of  the  deceased,  to  manifest  to  them  the  heartfelt 
sympathy  of  the  people  of  Cambridge  in  their  bereavement. 


The  foregoing  resolutions  were  unanimously  adopted  by  both  branches 
of  the  City  Council. 

A  copy  of  the  same  was  sent  to  the  family  of  the  deceased,  and  the 
following  communication  was  received  from  Mr.  William  Everett :  — 


BOSTON,  January   23,  1865. 

The  family  of  Mr.  Everett  have  received  the  certified  copy  of  the 
resolutions  passed  by  the  City  Council  of  Cambridge,  and  desire 
me  to  express  how  much  they  have  been  touched  and  gratified 
by  the  words  of  sympathy  and  affection  from  a  city  so  long  the 
home  of  their  father,  and  so  constantly  the  object  of  his  interest 
and  care. 

With  great  respect, 

WILLIAM   EVERETT. 


At  the   regular   meeting   of  the  City  Council,  Feb.  1,  1865,  Alderman 
Choate  submitted  the  following  report :  — 
68 


APPENDIX. 

Ix  BOARD  OF  ALDEKMEX,  February  1,  1865. 

The  Committee  to  whom  was  referred  the  communication 
of  His  Honor  the  Mayor,  recommending  public  services  on 
the  22d  day  of  February  by  the  City  Government,  in  com 
memoration  of  the  life  and  services  of  the  late  Hon.  Ed 
ward  Everett,  have  considered  the  subject  and  respectfully 
report : 

That  in  their  opinion  it  is  expedient  and  proper,  in  view 
of  the  relation  subsisting  for  so  many  years  between  the 
City  of  Cambridge  and  the  deceased,  and  the  high  estima 
tion  in  which  he  was  held  by  the  people  of  Cambridge, 
that  such  public  services  should  be  held  by  the  City  Gov 
ernment  as  suggested,  and  that  Richard  H.  Dana,  Jr.,  Esq., 
be  requested  to  deliver  an  address  on  that  occasion,  and 
recommend  the  passage  of  the  following  order. 
For  the  Committee, 

C.   F.    CHOATE,   CHAIRMAN. 

The  order  which  accompanied  the  foregoing  report  was  as  follows  :  — 

Ix  BOARD  OF  ALDERMEX,  February  1,  1865. 
Ordered,  That  His  Honor  the  Mayor,  and  Messrs. 
Choate  and  Carter,  with  such  as  the  Common  Council 
may  join,  be  a  committee  to  make  all  necessary  arrange 
ments  for  the  celebration  of  the  22d  of  February  by  the 
City  Government,  by  public  services  and  an  address  com 
memorative  of  the  late  Edward  Everett. 

The  order  was  adopted  by  the  Common  Council,  in  concurrence,  and 
the  President  of  the  Council,  and  Messrs.  Merrill,  Towne,  and  Blanchard 
were  joined  on  the  Committee,  on  the  part  of  that  Board. 

On  the  22d  of  February  a  procession  was  formed  at  the  City  Hall, 
and  moved  to  the  First  Church,  under  the  escort  of  the  three  Cambridge 
companies  of  unattached  militia,  where  the  address  of  Mr.  Dana  was 
delivered  in  presence  of  the  City  Council  and  a  large  number  of  invited 

guests  and  citizens  of  Cambridge. 

69 


APPENDIX. 

At   the    regular   meeting   of  the    City  Council,  February  22,  1865,  the 
following  order  wa*s  unanimously  adopted :  — 

Is  BOARD  OF  ALDERMEX,  February  22,  1865. 

Ordered,  That  the  thanks  of  the  City  Council  be,  and 
hereby  are,  tendered  to  Richard  H.  Dana,  Jr.,  Esq.,  for  his 
interesting  and  eloquent  address  upon  the  life  and  services 
of  the  late  Edward  Everett,  delivered  this  day  before  the 
City  Government,  and  that  the  Mayor  be  requested  to  ask 
of  Mr.  Dana  a  copy  of  the  address  for  publication. 

70 


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